AMD, Intel, nVidia – Shouldn’t Interoperability Help All Concerned?
Looking at the situation in the marketplace today, and the amount of distrust and animosity shown by the big players, I must ask, “Isn’t this the business equivalent of protectionism, and aren’t we always warned that that concept is not beneficial to anyone?”
An article in Betanews shows how much anger there seems to be between the big players, and that the speed with which litigation ensues, shows why the PC industry just might be declining at a rate greater than it otherwise should.
During yesterday’s unveiling of its accelerated roadmap for 12- and even 16-core processors, an AMD executive said he did not believe the licensing situation between his company and Nvidia would enable Nvidia to produce chipsets that support future AMD platforms. Specifically, it appears Nvidia is not yet licensed to produce motherboard chipsets that support AMD’s next-generation processors, reducing the likelihood for multi-GPU SLI support for AMD’s “Istanbul” and future generations.
“For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time,” stated server business unit vice president Pat Patla. “We don’t expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010.”
Anyone spreading the rumor that Nvidia is looking to invest in Via Technologies may be thinking Nvidia could use a friend — any friend — about now. Its ability to produce chipsets for Intel’s Nehalem platform remains on hold, perhaps permanently now that it has countersued Intel over its rights to say it supports Nehalem in interviews to the press. Perhaps Patla’s statement that Nvidia will “support existing platforms” can be interpreted as the closest thing to an olive branch it’s going to get, especially from the CPU maker that now owns its principal competitor.
Back when Intel began to allow AMD to make chips, it might have done it for the reason that it simply could not keep up with demand, but soon it was apparent that by allowing AMD to compete it helped both companies. When companies compete fairly, allowing better ideas to make more money, and poorer ideas fall by the wayside, it benefits the consumers, but it also benefits the companies involved. AMD started making copies, and soon learned how to make improvements, and by the time the 386-40 was released, Intel knew it had better do its best, as AMD was a true competitor. That 386-40 probably spiked the move to the 486 series processors, and the race was on – things, for the consumers, and those two companies, have never been the same. Perhaps margins were cut due to competition, however, in the end the masses of money that the competition brought in made up for any initial shortfall in profits.
Just as nVidia and ATi have pushed each other up to this point, they should keep this in mind, the customer base thrives on choice – that choice is why we have graphics units that are so powerful that 4 of them slapped into a motherboard can give anything ever engineered by Cray a run for its money.
How many more motherboards would Intel sell, if it allowed Crossfire on all of its full-size boards? How many more if it allowed nVidia’s SLI on identical boards? And the same for AMD? And how many more CPUs would Intel and AMD sell if they allowed nVidia to design motherboards that worked with their chips? AMD should especially be grateful to nVidia, because not so long ago, it was the nForce chipset that was allowing AMD to take it to Intel. It was the nForce chipset that allowed AMD to recover from the egregious errors they committed when they gave us the mightily flawed Irongate chipset – AMD is really lucky anyone gave them a chance with glue chips, after that fiasco.
Where is the gratitude? If not gratitude, where is the intelligence? The intelligence of people who have studied a little history, and know that allowing the greatest freedom to the end-users gives the greatest profits for all concerned.
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Quote of the Day:
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
– Will Durant
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5 Comments
Kitty
April 25th, 2009
at 7:58am
Nvidia, AMD, and NVIDIA are 3 companies with nearly completely opposing schools of thought. Nvidia and Intel focus on lower power, more cores, and better (at least in intel’s case), better memory management.
ATI and AMD, neglect power conservation utterly (which raises the overall TCO *and* ICO of a system), they push old technology as far as they will go, and their support of mulitthreading, well… pathetic would be putting it kindly.
The nforce chipset was garbage, and while it worked well enough, it resulted in numerous dead boards, and many features being DOA, or at the very least experiencing irreconcilable differences with other hardware.
Besides, it’s really up to hardware companies to decide what goes with what board, and asking them all to be natively interoperable would be asking them to violate their fiduciary duty, which in business, is more important than anything, including protectionism.
note: I think you’d be surprised at how primitive and thoroughly unimpressive cray motherboards actually are, but nice alliteration.
Stepan
April 25th, 2009
at 8:28am
самое интересное…
Looking at the situation in the marketplace today, and the amount of distrust and animosity shown by[...]…
the oracle
April 25th, 2009
at 8:52am
Kitty, do you read the trades? It’s only been since Core 2 that Intel has been more miserly with power. From the inception of the first Opterons through the inception of Core 2, AMD absolutely owned processing power per watt. Currently, ATi has the more efficient designs, proving that the company does care about power usage. One only has to look at any enthusiast site to see how AMD has won back the hearts and minds of many, simply because it uses power better, giving great performance, with out the need for kilowatt PSUs. (I’m an nVidia fan, but I acknowledge that AMD is better positioned right now – and getting better positioned with each release – look at the 4890s; more processing power than the 4870s, with less heat.)
Do you remember something called Pentium 4? It bled power like no other chip extant.
I’m puzzled by your assessment of the nForce chipsets. I own 3 Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe boards, all of which work flawlessly, and haven’t had problem one. I have many friends who also bought Abit and other Asus versions of this chipset. These boards, equipped with Barton processors, took it to Intel, and no self-respecting gamer ever stated he actually had a Pentium board during the reign of these nForce boards.
From an IT standpoint, I work on many machines – I have yet to see an nForce board die, yet I have replaced lots of P4 boards, from many manufacturers.
(perhaps you are only familiar with nForce boards from 3rd tier suppliers, such as Chaintech)
Oh, another thing about the nForce boards, they had the best on-board sound until the advent of Azalia.
Fiduciary duties entail acquiring greatest profit, which, as I stated, is best done through cooperation.
What would you do? - Page 5 - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net
May 2nd, 2009
at 1:10pm
[...] Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry. shiiit…. lol http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle…all-concerned/ I feel kind of sad now for the companys after reading that, that guy made it all dramatic. [...]
Danieljohnson
May 12th, 2009
at 6:05am
The problem of course to me from first time is wrong Interpretaion, they said that “We don’t expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010″, to my ears that only means that UNTIL they know Nvidia or Broadcom don’t have nothing new to show. Not that they will not license anything.