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Nvidia Waiting In the Wings In FTC-Intel Dispute
The NY Times has a Bits Blog piece speculating on some of the fallout if the FTC prevails in its anti-competition lawsuit against Intel. The Times picks out two among the 26 remedies proposed by the regulator, and concludes that they add up to Nvidia being able to license x86 technology. This could open up 3-way competition in the market for combined CPU-graphics chips. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that Nvidia has been working on x86 technology since 2007, including the presence on its employment rolls of more than 70 former Transmeta workers.
Why does the remedy appear to be more harmful to AMD - an Intel competitor - than to Intel themselves?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Hah, that's rich.
It's not even real competition. NvIDIA's Chinese foundry'll just release another bad batch, the vendors' Indian and Filipino tech support will just tell their angry customers that it was the customers' fault and to fuck off, NvIdia'll exit the x86 market, and we'll be back to square one. I know this because I've dealt with HP's Magandas over this issue, and they had no shame.
Mods, meet my middle finger.
In the long run getting multiple competitors in the CPU space is good. The problem is trust busting worked when the competitors were slow moving oil companies or railroads, by the time this gets through the court system the market will be significantly different. What computer were you using at the turn of the century?
Intel effectively defrauded AMD of many billions of dollars in revenue. Intel should be forced to return those ill-gotten-gains to AMD and THEN be fined.
In the near future if AMD goes bankrupt (possible given their current uncertain situation) and Intel's unlawful actions could reasonably be considered to have led to the demise of their main competitor (AMD), Intel shouldn't be allowed to live with the benefits of their wrong-doing, namely a monopoly, and instead be forced to establish an equivalent competitor. The FTC may indeed be acting along these lines as Nvidia could possibly be a capable CPU producer.
I'm jaded enough to realize someone says so and so will be getting into the CPU market soon every few months. I've heard Creative and NVIDIA, probably some others I've forgotten. The thing that stands out to me is that VIA gave up. IBM gave up. Motorola gave up. Maybe the FTC can change things, but if they do it will probably break a few patent laws apart or force some fairly broad cross licensing agreements. Anything monetary is really just some fodder for the bankers to burn.
lol: You see no door there!
What computer were you using at the turn of the century?
RFC 1149 - Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers.
Silly Doncha member??
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If AMD and Nvidia can truly make competitive products, then having more of a non-Intel option makes that option seem much more mainstream.
You must have forgotten every you learned in Economic 101.
It is never a zero-sum game.
The more supplies there are for non-Intel alternative, the more the impetus there is for people to look for non-Intel chips BEFORE they look into what Intel has to offer.
The investment it takes to start up a new chip line is enormous. To some extent, CPU manufacturing is like the classic steel mill example in economics: The start up cost is so massive that monopolies become very hard to break once someone is has most of the market. This is true not just for chip manufacturing but even to individual classes of chips (such as x86 architecture). If I were running Nvidia right now I'd be very worried about entering a market with massive start up cost and where most buyers will continue to go to Intel simply by default.
As a 49 year old feminist grandmother I reject this license as it's caucasian male in nature and spirit.
is getting rather dated. My Geode is a little dusty too.
We've been using this instruction set for years and years now. There's gotta be something better around by now. Is it ARM? Cell?
Are Microsoft and Windows the only reasons we haven't moved on? How hard would it be for them to target a different architecture? Linux seems to manage fine in this regard. Rewrite a bit of assembly and choose a different c compiler. Shouldn't be too hard right?
What's the profit margin on those ARM CPUs? How much does each individual chip sell for? Oh, right, there's very little profits and the chips are dirt cheap...
This is what I came to say.
If you look at the stocks of ARM & Intel, you'll notice a massive disparity in their trading volumes.
Intel sometimes trades more stock in an hour than ARM does in a day.
Yes ARM sells billions of chips, but the margins are barely there.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I still think they're using Transmeta's engineers to run x86 code on their GPUs so they can get Windows to run on systems with other ISAs for their CPU. ARM and POWER, anyone? It sounds much cheaper and simpler than doing the insane amount of testing needed to roll out a new chip, and you'd get the added benefit of accellerating your everyday applications without needing to recompile them for CUDA. Plus NVIDIA will have the advantage of being the first ones out there with SSE5. So BAM!
I posted some of my thoughts on this topic here:
http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=8143
Why would NVIDIA want to dive into such a complex product line when the GPU is becoming more and more important in general purpose computing anyway and that is obviously where their expertise is.
What exactly are you trying to infer from the trading volumes? It just looks like more people are trading Intel because Intel is a bigger company. Also, the link to ARM you posted is for an ADR, so Google might not even be including the numbers from the native exchange. And above all the, the only thing a heavily traded stock should mean is a low bid-ask spread
Finally, ARM doesn't sell any chips. They design them, and license the cores to companies that fab them, ie TI, Nvidia, and even Intel.
I suppose the NYT could be right, in the sense that they see NVIDIA getting an x86 license out of this in the same way that conspiracy theorists see that the Apollo 11 landings were filmed on a soundstage.
There's nothing about remedy 17 or remedy 18 that would lead to NVIDIA getting an x86 license directly from Intel. In short:
17: Intel has to license its chipset buses to other companies (e.g. NVIDIA) so that they can make chipsets for Intel's newest CPUs. NVIDIA only has an AGTL+ license for older Core 2 CPUs, they don't have one for DMI (low-end and mid-range Core i3/i5/i7) or QPI (high-end Core i7).
18: Intel can't get in the way of AMD's efforts to spin off their fabs in to Global Foundries. Up until AMD and Intel inked their own settlement, Intel intended to enforce provisions of AMD's x86 license that required them to do the vast majority of production in-house, which wasn't going to be possible if they spun-off their fabs.
The only way NVIDIA could end up with an x86 license out of this is that remedy 18 would allow VIA to transfer their x86 license, and in reality Intel has never fully acknowledged them having one. VIA only gets away with it because they have a couple of patents that are critical to Itanium, and those patents should be expiring soon.
So I don't know why the NYT is claiming that NVIDIA is going to get an x86 license out of this. This seems to be wild dreaming, or an attempt to generate traffic with ridiculous claims.
NVidia and Intel have been at it for awhile, it's about time.
Somehow this supposed battle seems more wanted then they want to admit. What's the worse, they might join forces together?
Disclaimer: I am an AMD stock holder. Even if nVidia could get a x86 license from Intel, they don't have access to the 64 bit information that Intel cross-licenses from AMD. I guess nVidia could build some nice Pentium class processors, but not much else.
You mean the same way Nvidia has integrated PhysX into their hardware
PhysX isn't that much "integrated". PhysX is just 1 of the middleware for physics simulation on the market. The original version was compiled to run on some peculiar accelerator boards (Ageia PhysX cards), Nvidia just ported and compiled it for a different platform (Their CUDA-enabled GPUs). From a technical point of view nothing prevents a port / compile for OpenCV. From a legal point of view : Nvidia owns the code and can do pretty much everything they want with it.
Now, the big difference with Intel, is that PhysX is just 1 single middleware among a lot of others, not even the most popular (the might be Havok, maybe ?) and some of these are even open source (ODE). Game developper can pick-up any they might want, and will probably pick up middlewares that don't restrict them to 1single hardware platform (specially now that console releases are popular and that the market share of Nvidia is rather low among them : XBox360 and Wii are ATI-based, PS3 uses an older (pre-CUDA) GPU with the (GPGPU/CUDE/OpenCV-like) parallel calculations being done on the Cell's SPU).
Intel's situation is different. Modern commercial computer games run almost only on x86 hardware. Intel has a huge market share in x86 CPUs. By making their northbridge incompatible, they are effectively shutting out competitors. (Well, not that Nvidia is innocent at the same game : they initially tried to pull the same strategy regarding SLI and their chipsets)
The final result is that, Intel restricting its chipset has a much bigger impact on the market, than Nvidia putting only a CUDA-accelerated version of a seldom used physics middleware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If they hand more free goodies to NVidiots, they should ensure strings are attached - here you are, access to license and utilise x86 for a fixed period into the future, but you will now document your hardware fully, and provide it free to open source, so they are no longer reliant on your bug ridden, crash prone, binary blob drivers.
I can't believe the free pass this company gets here, given the black box nature of their offerings.
Modern commercial computer games run almost only on x86 hardware.
Computer games do not constitute a market. I would have agreed with you 10 years ago when x86 was the leading force behind most consumer level computer. {...} The traditional desktop PC is being replaced by portable computing.
Yes, I acknowledge that the real future in gaming is in the hands of ARM + PowerVR inside some i- / Google- / Whatever- Phone. And/or inside a virtual machine like Flash Player.
But that's not what WoW is running on, and that's not what the companies mentioned in this article and thread usually do.
This story is about change in the equilibrium between Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia, and thus specifically affect the landscape of *computer* gaming (hence my emphasis). A given the number of WoW-subscriber and such, even if they are out numbered by the people playing casual games on their phones while waiting at a bus stop, the computer gaming is still an expanding market.
AMD was ahead in taking this approach to improve performance. Intel is playing catch-up with is a sign that such changes are a result of competition rather than monopolistic practices.
The subtle difference is that AMD used an open standard for their bus (Hypertransport), whith 3rd-party chipset maker free to implement it (and indeed, VIA and Nvidia did at some point in time).
Same goes for ATI, whose CrossFire can be implemented by any 3rd party manufacturer.
Although Intel is currently doing the same hardware optimisation (moving the memory controller from the northbridge into the CPU), the bus used to communicate between this new generation of CPUs and the motherboard - QuickPath Interconnect - requires licensing from Intel.
Same goes for Nvidia whose SLI requires special licensing too (although it's PCIe under the hood).
Thus Intel and Nvidia have played a game of mutual exclusion by trying to leverage their licensing to force the other one out:
- Nvidia insisted on being the only provider of SLI-enabled chipsets.
- Intel insisted on being the only provider of QPI-enabled chipsets.
And in the end, the customer is screwed in having to buy expensive motherboard feature 2 chipsets, just for licensing reasons.
The impact to competition is offset for customers by the ability to have lower power, smaller form factor, and ultimately cheaper devices.
Well on the other hand, we're progressively moving from a situation of wide choice (where any vendor's CPU could be combined with a specific compatible chipset from any other and a graphic card from any vendor) to a situation of walled garden where people have only access to single stacks (Intel or Nvidia or ATI/AMD but not a mix thereof - although AMD is putting slightly more willingness to open their architecture).
And diminution of choice isn't necessarily good from a price point of view.
On the other hand, the general trand is toward integrated single package solution with hybrid GPU+CPU (Intel's ATOM+graphics or vapor Larrabee, AMD's Fusion, and a possible future Nvidia products with integrated x86 cores) (Well for completedness we should also site the embed market archetypical OMAP : ARM+PowerVR+a few other).
The playing field is significantly changing. The final result is unless Intel changes by making smaller, cheaper, more energy efficient integrated CPU designs, they'll be a dinosaur dominating a stagnant desktop/laptop market.
I agree with this on the whole but :
- I was only discussing about the (soon-to-be-niche) market of computer games. Not all video games.
- You under estimate the drag of legacy.
In a perfect world like you describe, anything smaller than a desktop machine would had switched to OMAPs running ARM Linux long time ago.
The problem is that there's way too much binary legacy around : users cling to softwares which only run under windows
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]