Intel Sued By FTC For Anti-Competitive Behavior

[Ordr]

How annoying.

[Thales]

They go after all of our best companies. May the people who run the FTC rot in hell.

[Ordr]

They go after all of our best companies. May the people who run the FTC rot in hell.

Indeed. Intel stagnated during the six-year period when their pitifully antiquated Netburst microarchitecture was slaughtered by AMD's K8 in practically every benchmark. Dell, IBM, and other vendors began offering AMD-based products during that time because Intel simply couldn't keep up. Only after a massive restructuring effort and the eventual emergence of the revolutionary Core did Intel begin to regain their place at the top.

The FTC's naming of nVidia is even more absurd. Intel does not make a discrete GPU. Their Larrabee project, something that would have competed with nVidia, has been delayed. Nvidia's market share dwarfs that of AMD/ATI, the only meaningful competitor in the discrete GPU market. My guess is that nVidia is gunning for the x86 ISA to finally be able to make their own CPUs.

[Andrew Grathwohl]

My guess is that nVidia is gunning for the x86 ISA to finally be able to make their own CPUs.

This is a very interesting prediction - something that is not too crazy of an idea at all. I was reading an article by somebody claiming that GPUs were going to become the metric for computing power, rather than CPUs. Perhaps nVidia is vying to accomplish some sort of more sophisticated version of what AMD/ATI does with their chipsets? If CUDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA) is any indication of where the company is headed in the next couple of years, then it appears that nVidia is trying to tap into the ever-expanding market of parallel computing opportunities, making their chipsets just as important as, if not more important than, the CPUs they parallel.