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.

Comments

Wow.

[zippthorne]

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

Re:Wow.

[sdnoob]

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).

Re:Wow.

[hairyfeet]

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.

Intel's ill-gotten-gains

[distantbody]

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.

Re:Ugg...

[the linux geek]

IBM gave up?

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

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

Re:Ugg...

[bhtooefr]

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.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[A12m0v]

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.

Is x86 shit?

[some_guy_88]

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?

Re:Is x86 shit?

[SpazmodeusG]

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.

Re:Is x86 shit?

[maccodemonkey]

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.

Re:Not necessarily.

[servognome]

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.