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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.
use this patent nonsense to stop progress.
This pairing makes much more sense then Intel and nVidia.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Can someone tell me which one is better, please?
Thank you !
Is another man's definition of "Horse shit"
THIS is how "switchable graphics" is done. Nvidia, take note!
Please don't!
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.
Stop, do not pass go, you lose 20% of your stock holdings.
Probably just a dream, but this could be a very big step forward. The lack of a standard GPU instruction set have paved the way of dozen of different architectures that each consume ressources in support for a very average quality and very few open source one. A GPU architecture as standard and open as CPU would allow to concentrate the ressource on a open and high quality support.
Remembering a FreeBSD Radeon KMS hell I'd prefer anything else.
do AMD and nVidia have a bunch of overlapping patents that would let Intel slot one in for the other or something? At any rate the one thing AMD does right is integrate graphics, it's just that integrated can never really compete with Discrete. My GPU is mid-range and still has it's own power supply, fans, and cranks heat out back the case...
Oh, and WTF is up with AMD's stock? It's under $3. Is there something I don't understand here? Their patent portfolio alone makes them worth more than that.
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Wha?
Some years ago nVidia had a massive power bug in their chips causing blue screens of death. Not everyone was affected, but for those who were life was hell. There was a campaign to get them to fix it but they ignored it. Well fuck them. Your mileage may vary, but I wouldn't touch nVidia with a bargepole after that. Fuck those guys. I've stuck with ATI after that so I like this news.
I am so sick of seeing Trump, Bernie, and Hillary here. It's nice to see good old intel, nvidia, and AMD once again. Intel has to engage in quite a bit of strategizing. intel has its own 3d graphics, and can license from nvidia, AMD, or imagination. How does intel make deals to get as little money flowing to nvidia, AMD, or imagination as possible? I don't know, but it is fun to watch. Maybe Trump should get a job at intel dealing with 3d graphics licensing, instead of running for president.
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.
... The definition of conservatism.
with a few clever legal tricks and the value of the company plundered. I'm surprised nobody is doing this. I've heard Intel keeps them around for 'competition' so they don't get a real lawsuit. Microsoft might prop them up too. But right now they look primed to be 'Bained'. I guess it depends on who they owe money too though.
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intel wanted better performing graphics?
i've had amd and intel, and radeon and geforce. amd just sucks, period. cheaper? processors usually, gpu sometimes.. but better? no fucking way. dollar for dollar, intel and geforce builds the better gaming rig.
This software patent shit is WHY nvidia doesn't have open drivers.
No, it is not.
Software patents HAVE NOT prevented Intel to assemble an entirely separate team and/or subcontract,
so that the Linux drivers are a software stack : entirely separate from the Windows one and almost entirely made of free/libre opensource software. (Minus the mini scandal around recent firmware).
All at the same time as AMD has - in parallel of the old "fglrx" stack - has supported a parallel effort to build an opensource stack, by publishing and providing informations/documentation, and also by having some of the opensource developpers on their own payroll.
They have kept TWO parallel development: the software patent encumbered legacy aquired from FireGL *AND* a newer free/libre opensoure stack.
With so much success to the point that they are now deprecating the legacy stack and replacing it with a new hybrid stack where the foundation (DRM kernel driver on Linux) is opensource, and only the 3D library is either the opensource Mesa/Gallium3D or the closed source Radeon Crimson Driver (the new successor of Catalyst). With plans to to successively reduce the closed source surface to bare minimum (the clearly stated end goal is to have nearly everything opensource, baring a minimal optional part that gamers and workstation can switch if they value raw 3D performance more than software freedom).
Meanwhile Nvidia has done nearly nothing for the opensource world. They have barely put any effort to support Nouveau developers, except for a few limited documentation mostly to help support the embed Tegra series, which has only accidentally sometime helped support for Desktop and laptop GPUs.
No documentations for GPUs released, no material support for developpers, no opensource devs on Nvidia's payroll.
In short: software has never prevented Intel and AMD, why should this suddenly be an acceptable excuse for Nvidia ?
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US-ASCII is the same as the lower 7 bits UTF-8. You can't actually tell if my post is US-ASCII or UTF-8 right now, because it is legally both.
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Nobody cares.
Gonna be pretty hard securing Radeon licensing from nVidia... maybe they should have considered switching way sooner.
nvidia actually does use a majority of third-party licensed patents that they are not the owners of in both their hardware and software stacks
The question isn't about their hardware. The hardware could very well be closed or open, that doesn't change the matter of opensource drivers. Nobody is asking nvidia for the VHDL of their chips. Intel's and AMD's hardware are closed too. Very few GPU have open cores in fact (only a few experimental).
They can't just up and say "Here, go use this stuff we don't own nor have permission to redistribute openly!", you silly goose, yet that is exactly what you're expecting them to do.
Again, the question is not (necessarily) for Nvidia to publish the source of their whole driver, including the parts that they don't own. That's not a requirement for having an open-source driver. Though it helps: Intel driver *are* released as opensource from the beginning. But it's not a requirement. AMD still hasn't released the code of the fglrx drivers (which may contain some parts for which AMD doesn't own all rights). But AMD has release documentation documenting their drivers. This documentation has helped writing open-source drivers (which at the beginning didn't share code with the fglrx official drivers. They were 2 different implementations of drivers for the same hardware, only 1 of which is opensoruce). AMD is also paying a few of the developers for opensource driver with their own money (again these are different devs than the closed source one. In fact, they were on diferent teams, before the AMDGPU driver got started. Hence the dramatic differences in code style and quality). the fglrx and open-source drivers only started sharing code recently, and that's an entirely new GPL part of the stack.
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