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FTC Introduces New Orders For Intel; No Bundling
eldavojohn writes "Today a decision was handed down (PDF) from the FTC that underlined new guidelines for Intel in the highly anticipated investigation. Biggest result: the practices Intel employed, like bundling prices to get manufacturers like Dell to block sales of competitors' chips, must stop. No word yet on whether or not Intel will face monetary fines from the FTC like they did in Europe over the same monopolistic practices."
Other than, of course, the fact that an intel GPU comes on the die of every intel CPU sold, atoms excepted(for now).
This order just prevents them from trimming PCIe so as to make their GPU the only thing with a fast enough connection to the CPU that it isn't a total joke.
So Dells are going to get worse?
Oh boy.
Dell has sold AMDs for a while now. They tend to be the poor cousins of the intels(you rarely see them in the enterprise lines, and their BIOSes don't get the same Dell branding, and so forth); but they do exist.
At least back when I last looked, the convention seemed to be that the model numbers ending in "1" were AMDs, while the ones ending in "0" were intels, ie. the Inspiron 530 was a basic consumer desktop tower. The Inspiron 531 was the otherwise similar model; but AMD based.
Oops, nm it seems they have gotten back together after Dell canceled a line of AMD computers back in 2006.
Poor Cousins? Rarely seen in Enterprise? How do you explain this? For those too lazy to click, it's Dell's PowerEdge Rack servers. Nice mix of Intel and AMD CPUs.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
You obviously aren't familiar with the business practices that led to this ruling. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like dell, hp, acer, lenovo, etc. get wholesale prices negotiated directly with Intel. It was suggested that if one of these OEMs was rumored to be in talks to offer an AMD proc system Intel would send a rep to advise them that they could no longer offer them preferred OEM pricing and the OEM would need to find a third party supplier to purchase their Intel chips in the future. Basically making the OEM buy their chips at retail prices. If you are looking at 20-30% increase in the cost of your primary component in an already tight margin product or shuttle your plans it's not hard to make that decision.
You also probably weren't aware of just how right your statement about the Itanium vs x64 was either. The Itanium was Intel's attempt to lock AMD out of the "clone" market because AMD didn't have a cross license to use the Itanium architecture. If the Itanium had succeeded there would no longer be a choice of processor for Intel based systems. Fortunately the Pentium 4 was a dog and ran very hot and consumed massive amounts of electricity. AMD meanwhile didn't rest on their laurels and came up with the x64 extensions which gave new life to the x86 line. Developers liked the x64 extensions because they didn't have to rewrite their code from scratch so it caught on quickly and Intel eventually licensed the x64 extensions from AMD.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
If that's really the case, why aren't you putting a stop to carrier lock-in for cellphones? Some of those agreements are WAY more anti-competitive than any Intel contract ever was.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
really? whats competative at the $300 point with AMD Phenom II X6 1090T from Intel?
The benchmarks I've seen show even an i5 being competitive with a Phenom II X6, let alone an i7. And if you're really looking for the best possible mult-threaded performance -- which is the only reason for buying a 6-core CPU -- why would you settle for second best?
Do you seriously think that AMD would be selling their top of the range CPUs for $300 if they didn't have to in order to compete with Intel's?
Why is it so obvious that I'm not familiar with it?
Here's the "inside" scoop, as I used to work for a large OEM who used Intel processors. We would work on an AMD solution, and let Intel see it, and then give us a better deal (which would allow us to cancel the AMD project...until next year). If you are correct, just talking to AMD would get us thrown off the Intel bus (pun intended).
Mod parent down -1, INCORRECT! (OK, since you realized how correct I was about Itanium, we'll let it slide)
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
From TFA:
The agency said Intel forced computer makers into exclusive deals and blocked rivals from making their chips work with Intel’s.
Forced? How'd they do that?
Easy: Let's say Dell sells 50 million machine a year, and they are using 100% Intel chips. AMD wants to supply some of their business, and makes a bid to sell Dell as many processors as they can make (let's say 20 million). Dell wants to take the deal, and buy the remaining 30 million processors from Intel, but Intel informs them that if they do any business with AMD, Intel no longer supply processors for them (or will supply them at a much higher price than previously). Dell, faced with the choice of losing a supplier they must have to be in business, makes the only logical choice and doesn't buy from AMD.
On to your second point:
I think it's a good thing Intel "blocked rivals" from making compatible chips. While Intel was busy screwing up Itanium, AMD came out with a good 64-bit technology, which Intel is now using. That saved us all from having to switch to Itanium (thanks, AMD!)
"Blocking rivals from making compatible chips" isn't at issue here. Everyone does that; the x86 cross-licensing deal between Intel and AMD is unique among the industry. No one is saying that AMD should have been allowed to make an Itanium clone.
How will this change? Intel knows how many systems Dell, HP and others ship. They don't have to sign exclusive deals, but they can sign "volume sales" deals. Where does the huge discount kick in? At X units (where X is just about what your total sales forecast is).
Volume sales deals aren't illegal. Making your volume sales deal contingent on not doing business with a rival? That's a different story. In the example above, Intel would still be able to tell Dell that they would get a discount if they purchased 50 million processors, but AMD still must be allowed to say, "Hey Dell, we think you can sell 10 million extra units if you build machines around our processors". However, I don't know if the details of the FTC judgement would restrict this sort of volume deal for the duration of the supervisory period.
The point being that X should be the same for all the customers
There is no statutory or regulatory rules that says you can't give certain customers better prices. Companies do it all the time and face no legal issues by doing so.
If it is not it only means that they are making you pay Intel because you sell many AMDs.
If one was selling so many AMDs why would they care about losing their deal with Intel? If it was really as lucrative to sell AMD chips as people like to claim it would have been everyone would have just been exclusively using or heavily selling on AMD chips.
Works out exactly the same as the Microsoft anti trust things work for Apple.
It makes absolutely no difference to AMD because they haven't been investigated for anti trust issues and currently have such a low percentage of the overall market for PC chips that they are unlikely to ever get investigated.
The rules change for the abusive monopolists, not for their illegally stifled competitors
he's talking about 2011/2012 when intel and AMD start packaging CPU's and GPU's in a single die on a regular basis, right now it's part of arrandale (the 32 nm i5's). I'm presuming he's just misinformed that this doesn't happen now on everything. Or he's making a bad joke about how people don't know the difference between a CPU and the whole computer case.
For AMD this is part of their 'the future is fusion' marketing. I can't recall what Intel has called it. Basically rather than a processor core you get a GPU core. So an 8 core, or 4 core machine can really be a collection of CPU and GPU cores. In the short term this isn't likely to impact a lot of /. readers on their home systems, since you can power, and cool about 1200 mm^2 of chips, split between cpu and GPU but if you want cheap, or cool 'fusion' is a good strategy. It's not like most computer actually need or want a decent (hot) GPU anyway.
As a game development guy I'm strongly opposed to intel gpu's in home users machines. They buy crap and then don't know why stuff doesn't work. But the business desktop is a whole other matter.
The benchmarks I've seen show even an i5 being competitive with a Phenom II X6
I am backing up my assertions.
Intel does not have any i5 that is even close in performance with the higher end 1090T, which is what the poster you were replying to said he was talking about. Read that? Not Even Close.
The lower end 1055T (which you are talking about) also beats the best performing i5, the 760, and it is cheaper than Intels chip too.
On top of that, the OEM special-edition 1035T, even cheaper than the 1055T, also outperforms all the i5's.
The only thing the i5 does better than the AMD 6 core offerings is better single threaded integer performance (and thats only the best most expensive i5), but is worse at single threaded floating point. For multi-threaded tasks it gets literally destroyed by AMD's 6-core offerings.
"His name was James Damore."
The Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs have the GPU directly on die.
From http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei3/index.htm :
This processor comes equipped with Intel HD Graphics, an advanced video engine that delivers smooth, high-quality HD video playback, and advanced 3D capabilities, providing an ideal graphics solution for everyday computing.
From http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei5/index.htm :
Intel® HD Graphics on Intel® Core i5-600 processor series
Here is a good technical description of the actual terms:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4205889/Intel-not-fined--agrees-to-restrictions-in-FTC-deal
Read it. All it does is require that Intel stop engaging in the monopolistic practices that it has been using for the last 10 years. So their punishment is that they have to obey the law for the next 5 years. They pay no fine. They don't admit that they did anything wrong.
The best part is at the very end of the article. This is where the juicy details are always buried.
Two million dollars to monitor a company a size of Intel for 10 years? Pathetic.
Despite the hype that the press will put out, this is a complete win for Intel. No fine. No one in the company is held responsible. No admission of guilt.
You have been getting ripped off for 10 years by Intel/Dell/HP in the form of higher prices and decreased innovation. Remember it was AMD that created the x86 64 bit architecture, not Intel. When Intel was paying bribes to Dell none of that money was going into R&D. The EETimes article makes it clear that Intel was modifying it's architecture to make AMD look bad, not to make any real world code run faster.
Your will not get a dime in compensation for the higher prices you have been paying. When you see figures that Dell paid $500 million in fines, or Intel paid AMD $1.2 billion to settle a court case, they are paying with money they stole from you, the consumer.
This settlement is a joke. Non of the people who profited will be held accountable or loose any real money. Consumers had untold billions of dollars stolen from them and the crooks got away clean. Welcome to our so-called capitalistic market driven economy, sucker.
Why is Snark Required?
Probably not. Dell already used AMDs at some point in the past and canceled the line due to poor sales.
You mean because of the big under the table payment from Intel that they have been using as a slush fund so they can hit their numbers?