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Report: Intel May Dump Nvidia, Turn To AMD For Radeon Graphics Licensing (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Intel could dump Nvidia for a licensing deal with AMD as the chip giant tries to prop up its patent portfolio. Currently, Intel is under a $1.5 billion licensing agreement with Nvidia, which the two companies signed in 2011. At the time, the two companies had spent years fighting each other in courts over patent licensing, and the agreement put all that litigation to rest. Intel's Nvidia deal is set to expire on March 17, 2017, and a recent report by Bloomberg claimed that Intel is now looking to cut a deal with AMD instead.
Republicans always stand against progress.
That is their platform. No progress!
This pairing makes much more sense then Intel and nVidia.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Is another man's definition of "Horse shit"
Maybe you should take a look at their financials. This is a company that hasn't had positive net income since 2011. Zen needs to be at least somewhat competitive with Intel's offerings (or they need their GPU business to take a chunk out of NV) or AMD will eventually go bankrupt.
Their stock price is so low right now that the entire company could be bought for a little over $2 billion if someone were so inclined. Intel makes more quarterly profit than AMD is worth as a company. From a certain perspective they're likely worth more if they closed shop entirely and just collected Intel's licensing fees, but Intel clearly doesn't want it to come to that.
... The definition of conservatism.
Strange enough, being effectively a monopoly makes your moves watched closely by regulators. But funding the illusion of a competitor frees Intel from the scrutiny.
In short, when you buy an Intel product, you contribute to AMD's bottom line through muddy agreements in which the amount of money paid to AMD is what is needed to keep AMD alive. With this money AMD can still produce processors, which actually aren't real competition to Intel products, but is good enough for now in the eyes of the regulators.
Maybe this was becoming a bit gross, so now Intel decides to pay AMD to have access to parts in which they are behind (GPU). However this means that at some point in the future, Intel will finally reach a point where it is ahead of AMD and Nvidia and all domains, and kill them through a combination of better performance and aggressive pricing. After this Intel will be a monopoly for both CPUs and GPUs. When the only high performance CPU and GPU designers remaining work for the same company, it will be too late.
I'm old enough to have know when the computing landscape was owned by IBM. It is sad to say that Intel has now more power on the computing landscape than IBM has ever had (at the time computers were large and expensive, bit corporations and governments were careful not to buy everything from IBM. Other contenders, like Univac, Control Data, Burroughs and others had their market share). Now buy a random PC/laptop and type lspci, on most machines, every single device except maybe one or two (the GPU when it's not integrated) is Intel's. On our most recent server, lscpi returns 164 devices, out of which 161 have Intel's id.