Report: Intel May Dump Nvidia, Turn To AMD For Radeon Graphics Licensing (pcworld.com) 124
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.
Both Intel and AMD support FOSS. (Score:4, Insightful)
This pairing makes much more sense then Intel and nVidia.
Re:Both Intel and AMD support FOSS. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
Their low-power android GPU line isn't encumbered in the same way. Perhaps they will be able to develop it into a high-power desktop GPU line in the future, using whatever concepts in GeForce aren't under someone else's patents.
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But why would they?
Because patent licensing isn't free
Counter-example (Score:2)
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
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Because unlike AMD or Intel, 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, thus preventing your dream from being reality. 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.
Documentation (Score:2)
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 h
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Sure, if you care about FOSS support more than you do actually working with games without blowing up. I no longer do. All I care about is that the hardware that I buy is going to give me the best bang for my buck when I play games on my PC, and not blow the fuck up.
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I care about my hardware and software working together to do what I want, no matter how many iterations of "improvements" they go through.
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software patents makes your hardware more expensive.
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Yeah! If we're gonna have a flamewar, let's make it about technology! Like the old times!
Sega does what Ninten-don't!
Intel is no longer on-board (Score:4, Funny)
Life Support (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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in fact there are several cross licensing deals between AMD and Intel.
AMD isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Re:Life Support (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 a
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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.
May
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APU's will never beat a GPU/CPU independent configurations, and if you're not gaming the basement priced out intel-all-in-one APU is just fine for every day work. The computer market is very slow here in the west, outside of gaming PC's. However outside of the west, especially in countries like Japan, China and various places in Central/South America or ex-bloc countries in Europe. The PC market is what it was like here back ~20 years ago, just entering it's golden age of cheaper hardware. Especially in
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In other reports Intel currently seems to have an almost 100% advantage in IPC (Instruction per Clock) over Piledriver.
Assuming Zen gets that 40% improvement and the clock speeds are roughly the same as Skylake,
-an Intel quadcore would still win by ~40% over an AMD quadcore
-but an AMD octacore would beat an Intel quadcore by ~40%, if the application scales well to eight cores.
So it would depend a lot on the software. But AMD would finally be able to win against the i7 quads with software that scales well to
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They don't suck that bad. 40% bump will bring them within 2013/2014 haswell i5 46xxx and 47xxx territory. What Skylake has over haswell is integrated wifi, usb type c/thunderbolt3, and compared to AMD raid intel rst and insane power efficiency.
If AMD can't offer this it is dead and obsolete as OEMs are busy targetting the surface making tablets and hybrids with all these features and 10 hour battery life.
No one cares about the geek gamers rig.
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The geek gamer market might have shrinked a bit, but there is still money in it. Besides, the requirements for the architecture are not so different from the server/workstation market. A succesful Zen processor might also work well for small servers.
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No one will TOUCH a non Intel cpu for a server. Too much risk and a reputation of unreliable for many PHB who remember some of the shitty VIA and nforce chipsets of athlonXP's last decade. Windows Server and Linux are well supported with Intel cpus and chipsets.
My point was a fast CPU that is about as fast as 2014 won't cut it for OEM sales if it doesn't support thunderbolt 3 aka USB type c, insane power efficiency, and SOI silicon on a chip features to cut down on size for tablet use.
The MS surface is very
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Re:Life Support (Score:5, Funny)
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. :-)
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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.
Intel needs a second source, in order to remain a government supplier or as a supplier for large orgs.
Second time this has been reported in as many days (Score:2)
Stop, do not pass go, you lose 20% of your stock holdings.
Dream on: a standard GPU instruction set (Score:3)
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.
3d graphics is like VLIW (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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You are right that GPU started with architecture where the compiler take all the optimisation decision to allow the higher density of ALU into the GPU. I observe that today GPU tend to have more and more dynamic optimisation in there architecture, and I think this trend will continue. I will not be surprised that a some point in the future the GPU and the CPU will share a subset of the same instruction set. A such architecture will radially simplify the complexity of handling the compilation path for GPU co
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so you kill the innovation, like the x86 standard tied down the CPUs evolution until the born of amd64 instructions set
you need a standard graphic stack, not locked hardware: even on the same brand, the architecture completely changes quickly as more power and new features needs different technology to be accomplished
if the graphic stack continues to be supported and compatible, you got no problems (yes this is not the case of ms-windows drivers as they are never updated, like 32 bit devices on 64 bit ms-wi
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Someday the CPU and GPU instruction set need to merge at least in part to allow efficient architecture because there architectures difference will shrink. That don't prevent to extend the instruction set to get more performance. The important point is to not lock the instruction to only a single implementation.
AMD? (Score:2)
Remembering a FreeBSD Radeon KMS hell I'd prefer anything else.
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This. NVIDIA FTW on FreeBSD.
Not sure I understand this (Score:2)
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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They've got several billion dollars of debt, which negates much of what they have on the positive side.
The debt can be wiped (Score:2)
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Keep in mind they are in every XBoxOne and PS4
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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 i
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So one would think, but people in various countries persist in using their old one-nation-only charsets. Americans still use US-ASCII. Russians still use KOI-8r. Chinese still use Big5. And Slashdotters are still obliged to use EBCDIC.
US-ASCII is UTF-8 (Score:3)
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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Um.... Humour and stuff, like, y'know.
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It wasn't modded Funny, so it doesn't count.
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I guess the EBCDIC reference sailed right past you and the mods, then.
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*sigh*
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The ATI/AMD open source video drivers are really good; much better than the close source offerings from both AMD and nVidia.
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Have you tried the new kms driver in FreeBSD 10.1 and 10.2? It was functional but had outstanding problems in 10.1, but by 10.2 it was working very well for me; that was with an HD6850. Unfortunately I upgraded to an R9 390, putting me firmly back into the "unsupported" category. Hopefully it will get support sometime in the future.
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AMD WONT SUPPORT MAH 2 BIT OS NOBODY CARES ABOUT WHAAAA!!!
Jesus Christ. AMD has no obligation whatsoever to support you and your marginal OS. However, they have released more documentation for their chips than any other manufacturer, so if you insist on keep using FreeBSD, well get cracking. In the long run, as long as you can find someone willing to write FreeBSD drivers for your Radeons, you have a far bigger chance to keep them going rather than the nVidia stuff.
All of this however, raises the question o
That poorly written headline... (Score:2)
Gonna be pretty hard securing Radeon licensing from nVidia... maybe they should have considered switching way sooner.
Pretty much... (Score:4, Insightful)
... The definition of conservatism.
One man's definite of "Progress" (Score:2, Insightful)
Is another man's definition of "Horse shit"
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However, it's impossible to judge the worth of that content before investing time and effort to read it. That means it's very easy to shut down anonymous discussion simply by drowning relevant messages under a flood of spam. Pseudonymity mitigates that problem, as well as facilitating more complex discussions.
No, but people who ascribe malevolent intent on anyone who disagrees with them a
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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.
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1. amd looks better on paper
2. sometimes its products are actually higher performing
3. the first two are regularly made irrelevant by shit drivers
1. nvidia is way overpriced
2. they're anti open source
3. their drivers do work most of the time, on windows and on linux