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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.
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.
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.
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.
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