Slashdot Mirror
US FTC Sues Intel For Anti-Competitive Practices
Vigile writes "And here Intel was about to get out of 2009 with only a modestly embarrassing year. While Intel and AMD settled their own antitrust and patent lawsuits in November, the FTC didn't think that was good enough and has decided to sue Intel for anti-competitive practices. While the suits in Europe and in the US civil courts have hurt Intel's pocketbook and its reputation, the FTC lawsuit could very likely be the most damaging towards the company's ability to practice business as they see fit. The official hearing is set for September of 2010 but we will likely hear news filtering out about the evidence and charges well before that. One interesting charge that has already arisen: that Intel systematically changed its widely-used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors."
Hopefully this will free up Nvidia to continue innovating in the integrated GPU arena. Intel's best attempt at competing against the year-old 9400M apparently only matches half of its performance at best. And wasn't Intel actively preventing Nvidia from competing for inclusion in the newest motherboard designs by failing to license certain Core iX chipset components?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
The thing is they DIDN'T out compete the rest of the market. Intel did many of the same things as Microsoft - ie, strong arming their customers (large corporate customers not individuals) to "encourage" them to sell ONLY Intel chips. Intel may have the edge in performance now but their entire Pentium 4 line was horrendous compared to AMD's offerings (and costed MORE). They still went into almost all computers though because Intel wouldn't let most companies offer AMD chips as an alternative.
Now they've managed to leap-frog back into the performance lead (they're still more expensive overall), but that doesn't mean that they outcompeted anything. Heck I'm fairly certain that had Intel not behaved as they did AMD's increased profits would have manifested into more R&D investment and AMD might would still be in front for performance.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Well, since it's written and designed by INTEL to optimize code for INTEL processors, I'd say that anyone who thought it was going to do anything to help an AMD processor was, well, shouldn't be programming anyway.
I used the Intel compiler when it came out and then dropped it like a hot potato when it started "optimizing" out lines of code. Like the calculation that it was supposed to be doing. When I reported this problem to Intel, with code snippet, they said "what bug?". Bye bye, Intel, bye bye any reason to use Intel CPUs.
And as I recall, even optimizing out the results only got me a 5% increase in speed.
It's used in a lot of high-performance computing environments.
Our HPC people here use the Portland Group. On AMDs.