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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.
AMD might have a bit of an upswing once their new Zen CPUs come out next year, but they'll need to have made some serious strides because they can't afford another Bulldozer.
My guess is that Intel is hedging and looking for a way to keep AMD around in order to avoid becoming a de facto monopoly in the x86 space, which they'd rather avoid. Give AMD enough cash to keep them upright while Intel continues to rake in big profits.
In the late 90s, intel figured they could change around the instruction set for good performance, if they had good compilers. That didn't work out in reality. However, that DOES work out in 3d graphics. The problem is that the animation people want to do different things, the number of transistors keeps changing, and Microsoft changes around its graphics API and operating system.
I would like a standardized framebuffer, or something like that.