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."
Our competitive practices aren't like your competitive practices.
The compiler identified the CPU and changed it's behavior to be unoptimized if not the "golden" part. This falsely caused publicly used benchmarks to show competitors parts to be slower.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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
I like the complaint about the compiler. After all, Intel should be required to optimize their compiler for their competitor. To each according to his need...
The allegation is their compiler can, but deliberately does NOT, apply optimization to code if it detects the processor is AMD.
This is analogous to video game consoles refusing to use generic memory sticks or hard drives. Of course, intel will try to claim it's more like trying to attach a sata drive to an IDE port, but we all know the instruction sets for X86 are standard across both chips.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Have you considered the possibility that some legal actions are actually about upholding the law, rather than some sinister ulterior motive?
Back when AMD's microprocessors were the state of the art (Athlon), they should have had 50% or more of the chip market. Intel only was able to preserve its market share through illegal means. Eventually, through the billions in extra profit they made, they were able to pull ahead in this technology race. AMD was deprived of billions is profit which they could have used for more R&D to make their chips more competitive today. I don't know how you restore a market where one player has been cheating illegally for a decade and now has a monolopy, but Good Luck FTC.
This is analogous to video game consoles refusing to use generic memory sticks or hard drives. Of course, intel will try to claim it's more like trying to attach a sata drive to an IDE port, but we all know the instruction sets for X86 are standard across both chips.
Generally yes, but the intel compiler really shines by optimizing for the newer instructions that competitors may or may not have yet. SSSE3 (not to be confused with SSE3), SSE4, SSE5, etc are only found on newer intel chips. Not to mention the ones that AMD adds too (3DNow, CVT16, etc) or the differences between comparable instructions and registers (AMD-V/VT-X, AMD64/EM64T, etc). The x86 ISA as a "standard" is quite a mess.
Should we expect intel to track competitors' features for each target platform?
Sigs are for losers
There are some differences(3Dnow! is AMD only, SSE isn't present on some AMD chips, and a whole bunch of other minutia).
Thing is, though, chips declare which features they support: "flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae..." and who made them "vendor_id: GenuineIntel/AuthenticAMD". Intel's compiler, though, was ignoring the feature flags if the vendor_id was not "GenuineIntel". It would be silly to demand that intel support 3Dnow! or any other AMD-specific oddities, or demand that it ensure that the binaries it produces are equally well optimized for the precise architectural details of AMD's CPUs.
Blatantly ignoring the feature flags on non-intel CPUs, though, is another matter.
because of the hardware differences, and didn't put in a switch for AMD, well, who says they had to,
Apparently, the government. You see it wasn't a case where they simply didn't setup their compiler to optimize for AMD's parts. They explicitly made it run worse if you were running non-Intel hardware. Normally that would just be incredibly sleezy, but Intel is quite possibly in a monopoly position, which makes some behavior that's normally just sleezy illegal instead.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/16/intel-responds-to-ftc-suit/
No, the company designed a compiler that performed a lot of optimizations for the particular instruction set they implemented, and then hard coded the compiler to not actually apply those optimizations on their competitors' implementations. The optimizations would have worked, and Intel had the compiler deliberately not apply them.
There is no conspiracy; Intel just broke the law. If you are competing with me, you have to follow the law, no matter how much you want me out of the game.
Palm trees and 8
There is no conspiracy: This is business. Business is inherently anti-competitive. If I'm competing with you, I want you out of the game, and just like in a video game, I will use combo attacks and drop-kick you right as you get up (repeatedly) to keep you from recovering until you throw the controller at me. That's just how the game is played. (See slashdot, we can avoid car analogies!)
Let's make the car analogy... In Indy car racing, you are not allowed to smash into your opponent over and over again until his car is a smoking pile of metal and then run him over as he leaves the flaming wreckage. This is against the rules.
There are rules in business just as in car racing. Intel broke them. Now they have to face the music.
The FTC press release says:
That sounds like a pretty direct strike against Intel's moves in the graphics market lately. Selling an Atom alone for more than the price of the same Atom bundled with a chipset, trying to prevent Nvidia from making chipsets for their Nehalem CPUs, bundling their own GPU on the package of all of their low to mid range next generation CPUs, etc...
It should be interesting to see how Intel responds to this. It's probably too late to make any major changes to Clarkdale/Arrandale before they ship, so on-package GPUs are definitely coming. But imagine if Intel were required to sell bare dice at fair prices (surprisingly enough, packaging a die is one of the most expensive steps of chipmaking), so that others could do the same thing. Imagine an intel chip with an on-package Nvidia or AMD GPU...
Sometimes I wonder if computers will always be built around motherboards as we know them. As motherboards shrink, and we start seeing multiple dice on a single package even in low end consumer gear, could the motherboard eventually be replaced with one big multi-die package? It would certainly reduce size and bring part counts down, and I expect it would allow for lower power consumption and higher speeds as well (although, of course, it would make building your own as an enthusiast impractical).
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Let's break it down. For instructions sets like SSSE3, SSE4, etc. Intel designed bits to identify if these instructions are supported. All competitors comply with these bits. What they did do is: if the part isn't identified as "Genuine INTEL" the compiler stopped code optimizations. This is a provable fact.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Are you fucking kidding me? Intel didn't just "not test" it with AMD's stuff, they went out of their way to make sure it wouldn't work on it. And if AMD's processors didn't run x86 code properly a whole lot more people would notice then just the ones using Intel's compilers. Do you even have any clue how a compiler works?
You are saying that what Intel did with their compiler is perfectly legitimate. I don't see how you can spin that as anything but defending them.
And that issue is long-settled: they are not allowed control over their own products to they extent they can harm competition in the market as they please. The only possible "issue" is whether their actions did or did not illegally harm competition.
Okay, now I'm definitely sure you don't understand the slightest bit about the technology involved. The CPU is already "unbundled" from everything to the maximum extent technically possible. They cannot "unbundle" it any further. The code would've run just fine on AMD's chips precisely because it is "unbundled" and is an interchangeable piece of hardware with multiple independent implementations. Intel has absolutely no defense here, certainly not on technical grounds, and you're just making yourself look like a fool trying to argue for them.
Like all US Government actions against large technology companies, this won't change a thing. There will be a dog and pony show for the public, followed by a relatively small bribe...err...fine, and business as usual for Intel.
This won't change a thing.
The end result of your philosophy is a society where one or two mafia-like power structures control everything, and everyone else is essentially slaves. Whether those power structures are national governments or corporations the dynamic is much the same. Granted that appears to be what a lot of people want. Preservation of a free society requires limitations on the abuse of power. The FTC part of that mechanism.
I write software that may be run on either Intel and AMD processors, so I need a compiler that works for both. If Intel wants to be in both the compiler business and the microprocessor business, they can't intentionally design their compiler to sabotage AMDs microprocessor business. If there are no limits on that sort of thing, then inevitably one company gets a near monopoly, uses its position to screw over everyone, and everything stagnates and we get poorer. This dynamic is why many impoverished parts of the world are impoverished. To the extent that we embrace that model, our economies will wind up in the toilet also.
They don't. But Intel does have a legal obligation to not cripple the product when detecting competing processors. The issue isn't that the compiler didn't know the capabilities of the other chips. It is that they intentionally ignored those capability bits and checked the manufacturer name instead.
Unless it is part of a massive pattern of grossly anti-competitive behavior which they then get repeatedly sued all over the world for. Then, not so much.
If they intentionally and maliciously change it for no purpose but to prevent their competitor's product working with it, yes.
"Suggesting"? I guess I was too subtle. I'll state it very explicitly: The proper functioning of the market is far more important than the ability of a company to do with its products as it pleases. And this doesn't make their products more "beneficial to use together", it just makes it less beneficial to use it with the product of a competitor to them in a different market, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you by both me and others. And after talking about how we should "unbundle" things like with Windows and IE, it doesn't make much sense to be saying companies should be allowed to do that sort of stuff freely.
"But then Intel can't make their products work as best possible with each other! What right do you have to tell them what to do with their own products!" And so on. Your arguments are once again not being internally consistent, even within the same post. While it'd certainly be nice if hardware manufacturers were completely open about all their stuff, this sort of thing in particular (making every processor work on every motherboard) is quite a bit of effort for very little benefit, particularly in this case. Being able to run an AMD processor on a motherboard for an Intel processor whilst giggling to yourself about how funny it is is about all you get out of it. It wouldn't prevent any of the highly anti-competitive things Intel has been doing, not even just the specific case of them being jerks with their compiler.
//Is there? No seriously, is there?//
Yes, there is quite a difference between not optimizing for your competitor's product and deliberately degrading performance for your competitor's product.
In the former case, there is no additional effort involved; there is a simple decision not to expend resources where they will not provide a return on the investment.
In the latter case, there is a deliberate effort to expend resources with the intention of harming your competitor. And while anti-competitive behaviour may be an unfortunate norm in American business, it is also an illegal behaviour for a company in a monopoly position.
Having hopefully clarified your sloppy manner of thinking (lest others accept it), we can agree your question was deliberately inflammatory and move on.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
No it was much worse than that. There is a CPU instruction named CPUID which tells you the processor family, manufacturer, and has a set of feature flags saying which extensions (e.g. SSE, SSE 2, 3DNow) that particular processor supports. Intel's compiler enabled SSE optimizations only if the processor manufacturer string was "GenuineIntel" and the processor family number was high enough, instead of checking in the flags vector if the processor supported SSE.