From Dec. 2009...
"" When the Federal Trade Commission announced its suit against Intel on Wednesday, longtime rival and critic Advanced Micro Devices flashed a simple thumbs-up. Nvidia, another Silicon Valley chip maker, was turning cartwheels.
“We’re ecstatic,” says Dan Vivoli, an Nvidia senior vice president.
It’s not hard to understand the difference in enthusiasm.
AMD, which has had legal tangles with Intel dating to the 1980s, has already had many of its allegations endorsed by agencies on three continents.
Morever, AMD also signed a settlement with Intel in November worth $1.25 billion–though the company agreed to disagree with Intel about some key issues raised by the FTC.
Nvidia, by contrast, has had less success in publicizing its concerns about Intel–not to mention highlighting the significance of the chips its sells called GPUs, or graphics processing units. Such chips, used in playing game software and videos, are increasingly key selling points in PCs.
In the future, Nvidia argues, GPUs could come to take on an array of new computing tasks and come to rival the strategic importance of microprocessors sold by Intel and AMD (also known as CPUs, for central processing units). This trend is sometimes called GPU computing.
The FTC seemed to buy into that argument. “Nvidia’s ongoing development of sophisticated GPUs and related tools poses a potential threat to Intel’s monopoly position in the relevant CPU markets,” the agency says in its complaint.
Keep in mind that Nvidia doesn’t just make GPUs that are sold as separate products; Nvidia also sells sets of chips that connect Intel microprocessors to the rest of a system, and include graphics as a built-in feature. Intel leads that chip set market, and consequently sales of such “integrated” graphics.
In some cases–notably with the popular Atom microprocessor that has fueled the hit low-end laptops called netbooks–the FTC alleged that Intel bundled its products in a way that made it all but impossible for Nvidia to compete.
The agency’s complaint said some computer makers purchased Atom from Intel along with its chip set and simply discarded the latter, because the graphics capability of Nvidia’s chip set was superior.
To combat this competition, the FTC said, Intel charged those computer makers “significantly higher prices” for the Atom chip by itself if they used a non-Intel chip set or GPU. It would only offer an attractive “bundled” price that used its chip set as well as Atom, the complaint alleges.
Intel’s response?
Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for the company, says the complaint neglects a key facet of its marketing plan around Atom; the company, he said, gives incentives to computer makers that agree to offer the chip in a netbook with a screen that is 10.2 inches or smaller, since the company doesn’t believe the computing experience with a larger screen is satisfactory. (Some critics contend that Intel is artificially trying to protect sales of its higher-priced microprocessors, but that’s an argument for another day).
Computer makers pay for using the bigger screen, not because they may be building a netbook with a competing chip set or GPU, Mulloy says.
The other issue focuses on “interoperability,” a piece of jargon that refers to the ability of one high-tech product to connect to another. Here the FTC accuses Intel of playing bait-and-switch with competitors, encouraging them to make GPUs and chip sets to boost the popularity of its microprocessors and then cutting off their ability to connect to those chips when it suited Intel’s purposes.
“Intel’s apparent willingness to allow Nvidia to interoperate with Intel’s CPU has dissolved as it has begun to perceive Nvidia as a threat to its monopoly position in the relevant markets,” the FTC writes in its complaint.
Mulloy points to a conventional contract dispute. Nvidia, he says, was free under a 2004 licensing agreement to make chip sets for Intel microprocessors until a new generation of microprocessors called Nehalem came to market.
But Intel contends that terms of a patent licensing pact between the companies give Nvidia no right to connect to such newer products, which have a different connection scheme not covered under the agreement, Mulloy says. Nvidia insists it does have such rights, and the issue is pending in separate litigation.
Then there are other more artificial barriers discussed in the FTC complaint. “Intel also took steps to create technological barriers to interoperability” to preclude competing chip sets from connecting to future Intel microprocessors.
For GPUs, the complaint adds, “Intel has created several interoperability problems, including reductions of speed and encryption, that have had the effect of degrading the industry standard interconnection with Intel’s CPUs. Some of this conduct appears to have been specifically targeted at crippling” GPU computing functionality, the FTC states.
On this point, Mulloy says, Intel simply doesn’t know what the FTC is talking about. While the company has been talking with the agency off and on for years, Intel says there are some issues the agency raised a matter of days before the complaint or simply didn’t bring to its attention. “We have seen no evidence of that, we have seen no argument of that–this is part of the last-minute nature of the case,” Mulloy says.
Nvidia insists such issues are very real, and the FTC’s effort to resolve them could have a big impact. “With the right outcome we can freely innovate for consumers,” Vivoli says. ""
Source of Post.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/16/ftc-takes-on-intel-nvidia-breaks-out-champagne/
Where is the FTC in the Iviewit Case? Or is that Something the FTC Deals With?
Intel is Evil, Very Evil and has been Illegally putting the Run on Competition for years upon years. Intel Needs to Be Held Accountability for all the Damage they have done to Inventors, to Companies who are Creative and to All of Us in Turn.
Intel is GUILTY - no Question about it - Who will They Pay Off this Time?
Paul Otellini
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