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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."
If Intel & AMD decided to offer GPUs linked by QPI & HT it would give their GPUs a big advantage with Nvidia unable to compete.
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.
At least for the forseeable future, Intel need Nvidia for the mid to high-end gaming market, because they're not going to be releasing GPUs in that arena any time soon.
If Intel doesn't want a GPU on their platforms, it is trivial to abide by the letter of the law and still screw Nvidia
During the public comment period, I submitted a comment about this and the FTC actually responded:
http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9341/101102intelletterbao.pdf
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.
I thought that Intel wanted to break into the embedded market that contains a lot of ARM and PowerPC cores with Atom? The FPGA + Embedded processor combination is pretty common, and PCIe is the way to interface them. Hence your low power/low performance chip is bundled together with another (FPGA or ASIC) that does the heavy lifting for a specific task. Every application that requires some serious, but fixed, number crunching is appropriate for this. I do broadcast related stuff, so the things that spring to mind are video compressors, deinterlacers, etc. Why spend lots of dollars and lots of watts on a powerful CPU when you can combine a amsll core and an ASIC/FPGA and get the same result? Without PCIe no one is going to consider the Atom for these applications.
Try instead looking at, say, a Core i5-760. 2.8GHz quad core chip for $210. Look up some performance numbers and then compare to AMD chips.
Performance numbers based on Intel crippling compiler.
Yeah. Even in cases where Intel's compiler isnt used for the benchmark program, many benchmarks still use libraries compiled with Intel's compiler.
Of significance are Intels Math Kernel Library and even AMD's Core Math Library (compiled with Intels fortran compiler!)
These libraries are extensively used in most benchmark programs.
"His name was James Damore."