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Despite FTC Settlement, Intel Can Ship Oak Trail Without PCIe
MojoKid writes "When the Federal Trade Commission settled their investigation of Intel, one of the stipulations of the agreement was that Intel would continue to support the PCI Express standard for the next six years. Intel agreed to all the FTC's demands, but Intel's upcoming Oak Trail Atom platform presented something of a conundrum. Oak Trail was finalized long before the FTC and Intel began negotiating, which means Santa Clara could've been banned from shipping the platform. However, the FTC and Intel have recently jointly announced an agreement covering Oak Trail that allows Intel to sell the platform without adding PCIe support — for now."
...by what the actual issue is here? And I did RTFA.
Something about Intel pushing a new proprietary graphics bus into a new chipset...they never actually mentioned how the FTC thing got started.
I went and looked up the specs for the chip in question. It's a SoC chip, just a PCI bus is all I could find. There's no market reason for PCIe, and it really wouldn't even offer much of a benefit, since the single-core CPU is barely pushing a gigahertz. The FTC behaved pretty much reasonably in this case.
...and in other news Apple has been forced by the FTC to try and fit a parallel port into the new 11" MacBook Air. It is anti-competitive to only offer USB.
Damn capitalists. What is their agenda? Next they will remove PS2 from motherboards and some poor Chinese keyboard manufacturer will go out of business.
Please re-read, it's Intel, not IBM... and there's lots of useful info in the comments.
I don't understand why Intel is being forced to support PCI-E.
more like light peak only no DVI no USB no vga.
also light peak only works with intel video and if you want to use your usb keyboard or mouse $30 cable or hub that needs a wall wart as light peak may not pass power.
want Ethernet $30 cable
want to use a ati or nvidia video chip you may need a piggy back cable to make it tie into the light peak network.
sorry, typo.
Two identical posts this close together? You must be a Slashdot editor.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Mod +6, Fucking Hillarious and +7, Truth.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
With no PCI Express support, I can just skip anything from Intel, since I won't be able to use any decent video card in their rig.
Thanks, Intel, for throwing away any chance you had at selling stuff to the gaming market.
Wait... does this mean Intel is going to be the next big corporation screaming about piracy hurting their profits? I mean, obviously, if no one is buying their crap anymore, it's the fault of the pirates...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Here is a semiaccurate article on this, with human-readable analysis: http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/08/04/intel-settles-ftc-and-nvidia-win-big/
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Intel doesn't want nVidia making chipsets, true enough, because Intel makes chipsets. However the want expansion slots on their boards because they want people using their boards. I'm quite sure they are plenty happy with nVidia and ATi graphics cards. Heck they've included ATi's crossfire on their boards for a long time (they didn't have SLI because nVidia wouldn't license it to them). Intel has nothing that competes in that arena, and they recently revised their plan so they aren't even going to try. They want people to get those high end GPUs because people who get high end GPUs often get high end CPUs since they are gamers. Not only that, they STILL sell the Integrated GPU, since it is on chip.
I just can't see them not wanting PCIe in their regular desktop boards. They know expansion is popular, and they also know that the people who expand the most also want the biggest CPUs.
Now on an Atom platform? Sure makes sense. These are extremely low end systems. PCIe logic is really nothing but wasted silicon. You don't have room for PCIe expansions in there, never mind the desire for it. Those are integrated, all-in-one, low end platforms.
However desktop and laptop? I can't see them wanting to eliminate it there.
Don't believe their bullshit. Two major flaws with their argument:
1) Nobody gives a shit about PCIe speed on the Atom. It is a low end platform, for netbooks. You are not putting discrete GPUs at all on it, never mind fast ones. You do not want that kind of battery drain, or cost, for that platform. Speed is really not relivant.
2) PCIe is way, WAY faster than it needs to be. 8x, which is half speed, is still more than you need as HardOCP found (http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/16/sli_cfx_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x16x8/6) even for extremely high end cards in multi-card setups. For that matter on the forums Kyle said that 4x (quarter speed) is still more than enough for cards at 1920x1200. The highest end discreet cards don't need it, you are fine.
Semi-accurate is more of a raving opinion rag than a news site. The guy who runs it was fired from The Register for bias, and that is right up there with getting fired from Fox News. He hates Intel, hates nVidia and loves AMD/ATi.
Imagine a world without AMD, cyrix, Nvidia or other chip manufacturers. There would be no market or competition to face Intel and the company could force you to run whatever they wanted. I mean, a lot like it is now, but more so. As a consumer, figure out how to support the competition equally or there won't be any.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I think this was in the pipe line before the new FCC rule came out
See here's the problem: Even if Intel's compiler does better for Intel's own chips, which I'm sure it does, it is still the best compiler out there by a long shot. Any time you see compiler benchmarks it is consistently the best thing on the market. Intel has a really, really good compiler team. So if that is a problem for AMD, well then they should be writing their own compiler. Like the ICC, they should make it plug in to Visual Studio so that VS developers can use it as a drop-in replacement to speed up their code. If they made it so it produced fast code for both kinds of chips and made it cost less (or even be free) than the ICC I cannot see it failing to take off.
However they don't, so the ICC remains the best compiler out there. That would be AMD's problem.
Also you are doing a classic fanboy thing of arguing what you think the world should be, not what it is. When someone is buying a processor they don't much care why the performance is what it is. They only care how it does in the apps they actually use. So if all their apps are ICC apps and they run better on Intel processors, well hten that's all that matters. You can rant and rave that the AMD processor "should" be faster, if it isn't it is all irrelevant.
Esp for embedded processors like Oak Trail, Intel takes their cues from customers as to what they want in a solution. For a SoC, they generally want as much integration as possible and there's not much point in PCIe except to for adding higher performance graphics and making the chip be able to do something that the target market is generally not interested in. So, should the FTC force Intel to make a processor the serve a secondary market (high perf video client) just becuase NVidia wants to build a graphics chipset that would give them a viable product? That may help customers that want what NVidia wants to do, but it would force unwanted changed to the product that Intel's main customers asked to have.
If you believe this, then you're saying Intel (unlike dozens of other other low power embedded processor companies, typically ARM-based) should NOT BE ALLOWED to build something with basic graphics for markets that want that? Really?
Seems like Intel would know better than the FTC what their customers want.
How do we get from anti-compete against AMD to 6 years if support for PCIe?
2) PCIe is way, WAY faster than it needs to be. 8x, which is half speed, is still more than you need as HardOCP found (http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/16/sli_cfx_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x16x8/6) even for extremely high end cards in multi-card setups. For that matter on the forums Kyle said that 4x (quarter speed) is still more than enough for cards at 1920x1200. The highest end discreet cards don't need it, you are fine.
8x ought to be enough for anybody...
That would also kill Intel's high-end consumer products. Most high-end Intel CPUs are sold to gamers, who aren't going to be gaming on some crappy Intel integrated graphics chip.
Can you quantify the gamer CPU market sales vs. the chipset sales currently held by nVidia?
My God, it's Full of Source!
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