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.

Comments

Both Intel and AMD support FOSS.

[EzInKy]

This pairing makes much more sense then Intel and nVidia.

Re:Both Intel and AMD support FOSS.

[dbIII]

This software patent shit is WHY nvidia doesn't have open drivers.

Re:Both Intel and AMD support FOSS.

[EzInKy]

Playing that game is what has destined nVidia to lose in the end. Shame they couldn't employ better soothsayers. For some of us it was obvious that openness would win in the end.

One man's definite of "Progress"

[Anonymous Coward]

Is another man's definition of "Horse shit"

Intel is no longer on-board

[orledrat]

THIS is how "switchable graphics" is done. Nvidia, take note!

Life Support

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Life Support

[jimbob6]

Intel already pays AMD a license for the AMD64 architecture.
in fact there are several cross licensing deals between AMD and Intel.
AMD isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Re:Life Support

[perpenso]

This is thought as the rationale for Microsoft to invest in Apple back in the 90s

Well that worked, who is talking about the Microsoft monopoly these days. :-)

Re:Life Support

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Life Support

[Mashiki]

AMD will eventually go bankrupt.

AMD has been in this position before, and Intel has bailed them out several times. Because a single company holding almost all of the market share would be bad, very bad in the eyes of regulators and anything else. One of the reasons that AMD does poorly in the eyes of investors is because unlike nvidia or intel they don't leverage their patents against other companies and generally give it away or via patent sharing. Don't forget that AMD is still recovering from the BS that Intel pulled several years ago, and Intel has yet to pay the 8B or so that the courts have ordered.

Re:Life Support

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Dream on: a standard GPU instruction set

[jcdr]

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.

Re:Which is better? ATI or Nvidia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone tell me which one is better, please?

Thank you !

Well now that we no longer have to consider GPU based virtual coin mining and only consider gaming, NVIDIA is better.

I know, I know, that breaks the hearts of *some* FOSS advocates but I was talking about gaming, not licensing based political agendas.

3d graphics is like VLIW

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Pretty much...

[AmazingRuss]

... The definition of conservatism.

Re:nVidia sucks balls

[Thor Ablestar]

Some time ago the Xorg ATI driver team decided that they would exclusively support KMS (Kernel Mode Switch) which obviously is NOT implemented in FreeBSD and anywhere except Linux. Basically it costed me US$1000 in unusable hardware since I falsely believed that my beloved Radeons would still be supported. The news of about 1 year ago are that the old console driver cannot support KMS but the new console driver does not support KOI-8r codepage which is required here in Russia. In other words, the hardware is still unusable. https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newco...

Almost the same problems plagued the Intel drivers (X cannot exit to text mode) at least when I tested it with FreeBSD 10.1. So I am forced either to use VESA drivers or install Geforces.

And I don't care about BSOD since it's a Windows thing and the Windows is almost nonexistent for me during 18 years.

Re:Thank god for a real tech story for a change.

[Plus1Entropy]

Yeah! If we're gonna have a flamewar, let's make it about technology! Like the old times!

Sega does what Ninten-don't!

Re:The debt can be wiped

[SumDog]

Keep in mind they are in every XBoxOne and PS4

US-ASCII is UTF-8

[OrangeTide]

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.