The FTC Sues Intel Over CPU & GPU Competition
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What the FTC Accuses Intel of Doing in the CPU Market
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The case fundamentally breaks down in to two halves: what Intel did against AMD in the CPU market, and what they’re continuing to do against AMD and NVIDIA in the GPU market. Let’s start with the CPU-focused complaints:
1. The usual complaints we’ve seen from the EU. Intel rewarded OEMs to not use AMD’s processors through various means, such as volume discounts, withholding advertising & R&D money, and threatening OEMs with a low-priority during CPU shortages.
2. Intel reworked their compiler to put AMD CPUs at a disadvantage. For a time Intel’s compiler would not enable SSE/SSE2 codepaths on non-Intel CPUs, our assumption is that this the specific complaint. To our knowledge this has been resolved for quite some time now.
3. Intel paid/coerced software and hardware vendors to not support or to limit their support for AMD CPUs. This includes having vendors label their wares as Intel compatible, but not AMD compatible.
4. False advertising. This includes hiding the compiler changes from developers, misrepresenting benchmark results (such as BAPCo Sysmark) that changed due to those compiler changes, and general misrepresentation of benchmarks as being “real world” when they are not.
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What the FTC Accuses Intel of Doing in the GPU Market
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As for the specific complaints:
1. Intel eliminated the future threat of NVIDIA’s chipset business by refusing to license the latest version of the DMI bus (the bus that connects the Northbridge to the Southbridge) and the QPI bus (the bus that connects Nehalem processors to the X58 Northbridge) to NVIDIA, which prevents them from offering a chipset for Nehalem-generation CPUs.
2. Intel “created several interoperability problems” with discrete CPUs, specifically to attack GPGPU functionality. We’re actually not sure what this means, it may be a complaint based on the fact that Lynnfield only offers single PCIe x16 connection coming from the CPU, which wouldn’t be enough to fully feed 2 high-end GPUs.
3. Intel has attempted to harm GPGPU functionality by developing Larrabee. This includes lying about the state of Larrabee hardware and software, and making disparaging remarks about non-Intel development tools.
4. In bundling CPUs with IGP chipsets, Intel is selling them at below-cost to drive out competition (given Intel’s margins, we find this one questionable. Below-cost would have to be extremely cheap).
5. Intel priced Atom CPUs higher if they were not used with an Intel IGP chipset.
6. All of this has enhanced Intel’s CPU monopoly.
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