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Intel sued for stunting performance of competing GPUs

iDevil

iDevil

iDevil

Associate
Joined
6 Jul 2009
Posts
118
I read about this a while ago in my friends Custom PC mag. Something about Intel doing something to their CPUs to make other GPUs underperform like nvidia or ati? Even though they still arguably outperform AMD systems.

Tried to find some info on the web about this but struggling.

What do you guys think about this? Has it put you off Intel CPUs? It has me, I've always used intel chips.

What are your thoughts?
 
This one post is enough to put me off buying intel chips ever again. I don't need a source, I believe you, damn you intel, DAMN YOU TO HELL!
 
Stupot_ said:
This one post is enough to put me off buying intel chips ever again. I don't need a source, I believe you, damn you intel, DAMN YOU TO HELL!
Click to expand...

I've always been loyal to intel aswell. Wanted an i7 till I read the article :/ maybe someone has the issue of Custom PC with this in and could give us some more info?
 
I'd like to know the Motive of the person that Originally wrote the article.
Personally I feel that the 1% of users that know more than most would be on them in a Flash if it was true. To many people want to snipe at Microsoft for them to get away with summit like this, They would spot it & be on it like a ton of bricks.
 
Any link to any articles actually talking about this in-depth? Even if it is a big pile of poo, I'd like to read the article in question before making judgement from a 1 paragraph forum post :)
 
Found something:

The FTC said it “may seek an order prohibiting Intel from unreasonably excluding or inhibiting the sale of competitive CPUs or GPUs, and prohibiting Intel from making or distributing products that impair the performance — or apparent performance — of non-Intel CPUs or GPUs.”

The agency also alleged that “Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, in a way that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors’ CPU chips.”

“Intel told its customers and the public that software performed better on Intel CPUs than on competitors’ CPUs, but the company deceived them by failing to disclose that these differences were due largely or entirely to Intel’s compiler design,” the FTC said.



Source: http://zedomax.net/2009/12/16/intel-sued-by-ftc-for-monopoly/
 
iDevil said:
A nvidia or ati graphics card?
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Still confused, the crux of the document seems to focus on CPU's, I might be wrong but surely you can't use any other manufacturers processor in an Intel board other than one from Intel?

"The agency also alleged that “Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, in a way that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors’ CPU chips.”

What am I missing here?
 
Cuchulain said:
Still confused, the crux of the document seems to focus on CPU's, I might be wrong but surely you can't use any other manufacturers processor in an Intel board other than one from Intel?

"The agency also alleged that “Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, in a way that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors’ CPU chips.”

What am I missing here?
Click to expand...

Hmm I'm not sure. Maybe for boards that have intel onboard graphics chis or something.
 
Intel have always had a dodgy business ethic (let them sue). In the 90's they did their level best to wipe out all competitors on the x86 CPU front. All except AMD have gone. They had appalling math errors on early pentium CPU's. They pay computer builders not to use other chipsets, CPU's. They brought out their own memory type which bombed totally, trying to corner the RAM market. They were totally behind the curve on the 64bit CPU until catching up. They had said it was not necessary on the desktop and only used it for server applications.

I would not disbelieve that they have firmware which advantages their instruction set over AMD, nvidia and ATI although Intel GPU's are somewhat rare currently. However their future business model is for a combined CPU / GPU. A race in which AMD is competing well as they own ATI.

Given the choice I will buy AMD all the time and have since 1993, a 486 clone. We definitely need a competitive CPU market or innovation and choice will disappear.

andyr
 
nkata said:
Intel have always had a dodgy business ethic (let them sue). In the 90's they did their level best to wipe out all competitors on the x86 CPU front. All except AMD have gone. They had appalling math errors on early pentium CPU's. They pay computer builders not to use other chipsets, CPU's. They brought out their own memory type which bombed totally, trying to corner the RAM market. They were totally behind the curve on the 64bit CPU until catching up. They had said it was not necessary on the desktop and only used it for server applications.
Click to expand...

All CPU's have errors, and they are generally well published. The fact that the Pentium FPU bug slipped through quality control was pretty bad, but to be fair, Intel replaced the chips for anyone who asked (I had my Pentium replaced free of charge by intel). Everquest players were made away of a bug with the AMD processors of the day which caused the bright red "Rubicite" armor to appear BLUE for anyone running an AMD processor.... Ok, its a less critical problem than the Intel FPU bug.. but clearly the AMD CPU's were making an error somewhere down the line.

I assume you are referring to Rambus.. Why intel suported rambus so much with early P4 systems is beyond me... but it wasnt "their own memory type". I assume rambus payed intel a lot of money :/

Intel were not behind the curve on 64bit at all, they worked very hard with Hewlett Packard to produce Itanium otherwise known as IA64... They tried a ground up 64bit design which could have had potential, but it was sidelined to specialist fields because it was not compatible with the old IA32 processors. With the money spend on the IA64 project intel didnt want to release a 64bit enhanced X86 architecture, and probably wouldnt have if AMD hadnt done it. It doesnt always pay to make the right move, a new pure 64bit architecture "could" have ended up considerably faster than our "upgraded" legacy 16/32/64bit X86 architecture processors. In the end of the day it was the end users that resisted "change" and opted to stick with legacy designs.

We'll never know just how good Itanium could have been as it doesnt get any kind of development budget these days ;)

To be honest, the argument that intel deliberately make their compiler to make poor code on "compatible" processors is rather ridiculous imho. They are optimized to produce high quality, fast executing code that makes best use of their flagship processors. Nobody forces developers to use intels compilers, there are several other good compilers available. Most compilers have switches which tell the compiler which CPU to optimize for... If a developer decides to optimize for i7, and the resulting code is weak on a Phenom whos fault is that.. intel's or the developer who chose that i7 performance was what they wanted? It only becomes an issue when intel pay the developers to use the intel specific optimizations... But honestly what do we want as end users... Anyone who buys a CPU wants their program to be optimized for their CPU.. Do we want every application to come with several disks, so we pick and install the "correct" version for our CPU? (Perhaps we should be asking developers for CPU specific optimizations on all applications).

To be honest I think the "compiler" issue was bigger in the P4 era, as the P4's strange design meant that code that ran great on P3's and AMD processors was generally poor on P4's. Unfortunatly P4 optimized code was pretty appauling on both P3's and AMD cpus. Its worth remembering that Intel set the standards for the 80x86 instruction set a long time ago, infact it can be tracked all the way back to the Intel 8008 in 1972. The only reason AMD even make 80x86 compatible processors is because IBM only agreed to use Intel 8088's in the IBM PC if there were a minimum of two suppliers. Intel supplied blueprints of the cpu to AMD who produced the 8088, 8086, 80268 parts under licence.
 
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