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Nvidia Waiting In the Wings In FTC-Intel Dispute

Posted by kdawson on from the let-the-chips-fall dept.

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.

31 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Wow. by zippthorne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why does the remedy appear to be more harmful to AMD - an Intel competitor - than to Intel themselves?

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    1. Re:Wow. by sdnoob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't know, but you're right. Any increased competition from another manufacturer will hurt AMD much more than Intel. AMD already has the bulk of the business from those willing to purchase non-Intel chips and an additional competitor will draw its customers from that group, not from Intel (who enjoys a large loyal following of customers who won't even consider anything else).

    2. Re:Wow. by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Uhhhhh...come again? I was a life long Intel man, going back to the 486, but after building a couple of AMD duals for my customers I just had to switch. Frankly the bang for the buck on the new AMDs is just crazy. I was used to Intel IGPs where you didn't even want to watch a video on the thing until after you got a discrete card put in, and went from that to actually playing games like Bioshock with decent framerates! From a fricking IGP?

      The problem is all the reviewers seem to care about is "sorry about your penis" 3DMark and Crysis benchmarks. But as someone who has been building boxes since Win3.x I can tell you the average Joe couldn't care less about that. They want it to be fast for the things they do, like videos, web surfing, etc and frankly the new AMDs have long gone past "good enough" for the vast majority of folks.

      The main problem AMD has IMHO is getting the word out. Ruiz was an idiot, and didn't advertise for squat when they had the lead, and frankly most folks don't really know WHAT chips are out there, they have just seen the Intel "bong bong bong bong" commercial. With the economy in the crapper AMD really needs to push the "bang for the buck" mantra and get the word out. Because frankly you can't beat $99 quads, and the new AMD IGPs kick the living snot out of Intel. But for what 95% of the average Joe is doing with their PC an AMD dual is "good enough" and the new quads are downright scary.

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    3. Re:Wow. by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When I recently went to price intel and AMD solutions, I ended up getting MB+CPU for less than intel's CPU with similar performance alone. And we're talking retail "black edition" overclockable CPU, not OEM, and a motherboard with every port I could want (well, OK, there's no fw800 on it) and support for overclocking, which I haven't even messed with yet. AMD's big problem is that they are fighting the perceptual technology leader — not the real one, but the one the public perceives as being there. It's much the same problem that's led to this as that which led to the perception that PowerPC chips were slow back when they were faster than intel chips: there were software problems (keep in mind, I'm talking about the K6 days) which mostly equate to problems with vendors.

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    4. Re:Wow. by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The intel part is superior only where the intel part costs twice as much or more. AMD is by far the leader in price:performance, regardless of what interconnect technology intel is using. An intel CPU twice as fast costs at least four times as much money, that's not a win!

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    5. Re:Wow. by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think the problem is most folks don't realize how scary fast the new AMDs are at everyday tasks. I took a little of my Xmas money to upgrade from a 7550 ( which frankly was doing everything I wanted it to) to a Quad 925 and the speed of this thing is just insanity. No matter how much multitasking I do it just keeps on coming, no slowdowns or stutters.

      And I built the original 7550 dual for just $525 after rebates, with 8Gb of RAM, a 1Gb 4650, dual burners, and Windows 7 HP x64. It is truly crazy the amount of raw horsepower you can get from AMD with very little $$$. I mean you can get a new quad for $99 retail! And you can get a dual OEM for just $53, and a retail box for just $65, it just nuts!

      And you're right, when you figure in the cost of a decent motherboard there just isn't any comparison. Like I said I was used to the ultra shit Intel IGPs where you had better get a card in pronto, and I went from that to actually playing Bioshock and SOF:Payback on an IGP? And the video acceleration works REALLY great. Just add Media Player Home Cinema (I prefer the Klite Mega Codec pack, as it sets everything up for DXVA, just check a single checkbox) and you have really nice smooth video with nary a stutter.

      The only thing I worried about was all the talk about AMDs being hot, but I found that even under load the stock cooler had never gotten above 107f, and with Cool & Quiet it stays around 88f when I'm doing my day to day. AMD just needs to push the "bang for the buck" mantra IMHO, and get the word out. Because as a life long Intel man I can say without a doubt the new AMDs kick some serious ass without breaking my wallet.

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  2. Competition is a Good Thing by xzvf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Competition is a Good Thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What computer were you using at the turn of the century?

      One with an x86 instruction set. Same as now.

    2. Re:Competition is a Good Thing by coaxial · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Intel x86. Serving all of us since 1978.

      There's no reason to believe that this is going to change. Motorola's 68k never went anywhere, and PowerPC is dead. IBM's Cell went nowhere. AMD? Well they make a clone, and have 15% versus 83% marketshare, and one-fifth the revenue. Cyrix? Well they went belly up and got bought by NS, then Via. We're talking scraps. less than 2% of the market here.

      Oh yeah, and AMD is teetering into bankruptcy. Primo competitive environment eh?

    3. Re:Competition is a Good Thing by A12m0v · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Since we are still stuck with Unix 40 years later and still will be 40 years from now, I can see that we could be still stuck with x86 for a long time. To the Computer Science graduate, they are flawed designs, but in the real world they work and work good enough not to merit a costly change.

      Yes there are CPU architectures, but are they significantly better to warrant a change? Even Apple after touting the merits of PowerPC succumbed to the x86 train. Even Intel tried multiple times to bring an alternative to its x86 line (iAPX, i860, i960, Itanium), but without success. RHEL abandoning Itanium is one more example. Sun offers x86 hardware in addition to its SPARC line, so does IBM and HP, and every other server vendor. There were a time when x86 was laughed at and not considered server-class. Now most servers and super computers use x86 processors.

      In the Unix-haters handbook, the refer to the original Macintosh OS as a better OS with better GUI than Unix and X, now Mac OS X is Unix, and if you jailbreak and ssh into your iPhone you'll find a familiar Unix under all the eye candy. Most servers either run Unix or Linux, so does most super computers. All assumed flaws of the Unix architecture accounted for nothing in the real world.

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    4. Re:Competition is a Good Thing by poetmatt · · Score: 2

      AMD is teetering out of bankruptcy, and the settlement + extra intel damage = expect AMD to leapfrog intel the next couple generations of cpu's. ARM, if it gains traction, will kill intel's market.

    5. Re:Competition is a Good Thing by jonwil · · Score: 2, Informative

      Power is dead? Tell that to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, all of whom are using PPC chips of various kinds in their current generation consoles.

      Cell is basically a PPC core with a bunch of specialist number-crunching coprocessors attached. And its by no means dead unless you consider the fact that a Cell CPU is found in every one of the 27 million and counting PS3 systems out there as being dead.

      I will grant that PPC is dead as a desktop CPU with x86 being the only viable solution at this point for mainstream general purpose computers.

  3. Intel's ill-gotten-gains by distantbody · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Intel's ill-gotten-gains by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Intel will be screwed if AMD goes bankrupt and the patents on a large part of the x86 tech fall into the hands of someone who has no desire to make x86 chips.
      Currently they cross license to avoid a patent war. AMD going bankrupt will screw Intel over big time.

  4. Ugg... by g0dsp33d · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Ugg... by the+linux+geek · · Score: 4, Informative

      IBM gave up?

      16-core 4GHz processor modules would like to have a word with you.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7

    2. Re:Ugg... by bhtooefr · · Score: 3, Informative

      VIA is still at it, they're just attacking the Atom end of the market, now. This is where they were before Atom came along, but they have been developing newer processors.

    3. Re:Ugg... by sznupi · · Score: 2, Informative

      It seems you forgot ARM processors...this tiny, insignificant part of the market which, by now, perhaps ships more CPUs annually than Intel has ever produced.

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    4. Re:Ugg... by ShooterNeo · · Score: 2, Informative

      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...

    5. Re:Ugg... by ShooterNeo · · Score: 2, Informative

      ARM itself has a market cap of 3.5 billion. Intel is worth, according to the market, 108 billion. Relatively speaking, ARM is a failure and doesn't make much money compared to Intel.

    6. Re:Ugg... by cheesybagel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even if you port Windows, you still need applications. Otherwise you are better off using a Linux distro where you can recompile the apps most people use yourself.

  5. Not necessarily. by XanC · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If AMD and Nvidia can truly make competitive products, then having more of a non-Intel option makes that option seem much more mainstream.

    1. Re:Not necessarily. by servognome · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not only that, but what if Intel tries to leverage their monopoly to get Nvidia out of their graphics offerings, and instead tries to bundle their processors with their own integrated graphics chipsets? One of the FTC's complaints was that Intel was doing something pretty close to this on their netbook/atom platform. If they tried it on the higher end, I could see that backfiring for them.

      You mean the same way Nvidia has integrated PhysX into their hardware and gone so far as to disable such acceleration if any additional cards made by a competitor are present.
      The move to system on a chip is not an anti-competitive practice, it's the way the entire industry works. Third party hardware solutions have long been incorporated into mainstream designs as their silicon requirements decrease. Discrete math coprocessors and memory controllers were devoured by the CPU, video decoding and physics acceleration have been integrated into GPUs.
      Why would SoC's from intel be considered anti-competitive, while AMD fusion and Nvidia Tegra, which are essentially the same, be considered innovative?
      The FTC needs to consider whether the consumer would really benefit by forcing chipmakers to keep various pieces seperate for the sake of competition. The continued decline in average selling price, combined with the increasing capability of each new generation of microprocessor indicates that consumers are not negatively impacted by such design integration.

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  6. Is x86 shit? by some_guy_88 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Is x86 shit? by Rockoon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, there doesnt really have to be something better. There are many ways to view things, and certainly x86 is one of the ugliest instruction sets still in use.

      But the modern x86 architecture has almost all the key features that make processors faster, and x64 has the one thing that x86 lacked (gratuitous amounts of registers)

      --
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    2. Re:Is x86 shit? by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's just an instruction set.

      The modern CPUs you call x86s use a non-x86 core with an instruction decoder bolted on to make it run the x86 instruction set. It has been that way since the Pentium Pro, the NextGen chips and the AMD K5.
      The AMD K5 in particular was pretty much identical to the Am29000 RISC processor. AMD just put a decoder on it and sold it as an x86.

      CISC type instruction sets are considered to be the most optimal for code density (better cache and memory usage). So we pretty much have the best of both worlds. The instruction set is CISC so we get the memory benefits and the code is run as RISC via an instruction decoder which makes it easier to pipeline and for parallelism.

    3. Re:Is x86 shit? by maccodemonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

      There have been quite a few different architectures, all supported by Microsoft and Windows.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA64

      Even though Microsoft abandon PowerPC long ago (XBox excluded), they still support IA64 to this day.

      The biggest problem hasn't really been vendor support, but compatibility. PowerPC held Apple back for the longest time because users had no good solutions for running x86 Windows apps when needed, whereas now they have WINE and native booting. IA64, while having some x86 compatibility, does not have clear enough benefits for consumers, and generally runs existing apps slower.

      Ironically enough, AMD pretty much killed IA64 and gave x86 a longer life when they came out with x86-64, thus cutting off Intel's attempts to replace x86. Smart business decision for AMD, but it hampered attempts to replace x86.

    4. Re:Is x86 shit? by evilviper · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

      Actually, it's just the opposite. There WERE plenty of better architectures in the early days of x86. Today, x86 is just simply THE chip. The one that's left, competing for the high-end, pushing economies of scale, being all things to all people, and most importantly, with a healthy ecosystem of competitors continually trying to one-up each other.

      Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown into x86, to try to increase performance on various tasks. If there was a better chip out there, it would get integrated into x86 in no time. FPUs come to mind. x86-64 and SIMD instructions come to mind. GPUs seem to be the next big deal, with AMD looking to have an x86-64 CPU in one socket and a GPU in the other...

      In short, if anything better comes along, it will quickly get integrated to Intel/AMD/VIA CPUs, and then there once again won't be anything "better"...

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    5. Re:Is x86 shit? by the_humeister · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Intel didn't help themselves by making IA64 expensive to license and program for.

  7. Why would NVIDIA do this though? by Vigile · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  8. Dumb Blog, And Not At All Correct by rsmith-mac · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.