I wonder how long till the FTC comes after Apple for bundling their OS with their hardware (just like the EU did to MS with IE)
Apple can never have a monopoly on anything because they aren't Microsoft
/fanboy
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Federal Trade Commission Files Suit Against Intel For 'Anticompetitive Tactics'
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Apple can never have a monopoly on anything because they aren't Microsoft
/fanboy
Sure they can, as long as they control enough of the market so that they can set the prices of goods such that an increase in price results in a decrease in demand less than would be called for in a competitive market. But I know it's more fun to rant that Apple is a monopoly than to pay any attention to the scientific/economic definitions of things.
i would love to see
AMD Athlon(TM) X4 620 quad-core processor [2.6GHz, 2MB L2, up to 4000MT/s bus] - $99 in a iMac 21.5"
nice performance for the dollar $99
AMD Athlon(TM) X4 620 quad-core processor [2.6GHz, 2MB L2, up to 4000MT/s bus] - $99 in a iMac 21.5"
nice performance for the dollar $99
Given Apple seems to like to keep the components pretty standardized so they don't support too many variations I don't see this happening.
iTunes/iPod is an antitrust suit waiting to happen at some point, whether the suit would be valid is irrelevant as the EU would probably do it anyway.
The problem with such specialized industries like processor design -> manufacturing, designing/building large aircraft, designing/building vehicles is that there is so much upfront risk in even getting started, let alone the costs involved in getting product #000001 to market that the power is always with the incumbent for the first 10 years or so, and why you generally need a current entity with billions in the back of the couch to consider jumping in to the new industry segment.
Intel needs competition, and they have done some dirty work in ensuring they are #1 but I wonder how much of what they did really hurt the competition? It wasn't like we had people rioting at the front gates of HP & Dell demanding that they get only AMD processors.
Keeping in mind that motherboards rarely (if ever) have supported both Intel and AMD processors it will cost the PC manufacturers a good deal of money to make the switch themselves, and running both types only makes the supply chain that much more complex. I would assume that if the AMD chips worked on Intel boards there would be more manufactuers willing to play ball. But is that the fault of Intel or AMD?
Like taking on any other industry giant you need a lot of time, $$$, dedication to your product & the willingness to continually improve your product. Other industy giant examples; Microsoft, GM (of the 50s), Boeing & now Airbus, etc. Sure you can play, but don't expect the current #1 to just give you 30% marketshare for Christmas as they had too much to drink at the office party.
Also playing into effect for the manufacturers might be some clauses in deals they wrote with Intel pre AMD arriving on the scene. I wonder if (m)any of them had stuff written in the contracts that said they would ony buy Intel processors for the next X years even though there was no other serious competitor around at the time for home pcs. (Power PC & DEC Alpha were around).
I'm not a big fan of the suit, but I can see Intel having issues with some areas as they pretty much dug their own hole.
The funny thing is he wants AMD to bring in "new talent"; the prescription is to bring in OLD talent. Of the core bunch of folks who created x86-64 and spanked Intel, there are, by my count 2 guys left. (Maybe 3. I'd have to sit down and list them out). The guy who led the team is gone, as are all of his direct reports (including me) except for one. Essentially all forced out.
Apple is hypocritical to base it's PCs on CPUs from Intel which is a craven monopolist when it bashes MSFT out of the other side of its mouth. Talk about cynical! Shame on Steve Jobs! He's only in it for the profit, there is no Apple morality!
Yep, here's where you're wrong. There are many different compiler programs which can turn source code into an executable binary. Even for the same programming language (e.g. C++ or C), some compilers are better than others. Intel's compiler is well known for being very aggressively optimized, so many software developers use it because the binaries from Intel's compiler often run faster than a binary made from the same source code using a different compiler. But that isn't the heart of this issue.
What Intel's compiler allegedly did was to sneak code into the compiled binary which said "If CPU Vendor is not Intel, run slower." VIA and AMD found out when they took one of their own CPUs, changed the vendor ID to Intel, and suddenly many programs ran much faster using the Intel code, without changing the actual CPU architecture at all.
In other words, it had nothing to do with Intel's processors actually running faster or the code being optimized to work better on them, but the compiler software took deliberate steps to make non-Intel products run slower than they were capable of.
Isn't that something like saying Walmart is going to face an antitrust suit for owning all the Walmarts in the country?
On the other hand, who knows with iPod the products, especially with some of the accusations re: flash memory etc.
nVidia chipsets suck compared to AMD's amd Intel's. Its like the driver team lose 1% of their brain every day.
Were you guys the same team that stagnated the Athlon 64 Development in the the AM2 era?
No. There were two design teams, one in California, one in Texas. After we delivered rev. A a few months "late," they brought in IBM to tell us what we did "wrong," and started to phase us out, while shifting responsibility to Texas.
Hmm... O'Well. If Intel makes my Mac run at top speeds, more power to them. Who cares about monopolizing the industry... Just bring me faster computers.
If I were to adopt your "monopolist" premise as fact, then Apple is compelled to use Intel over IBM and AMD because as the other vendors have experienced, they need chips at several capability and price points to offer a complete product line, and if the pricing is only made favorable if one uses almost exclusively that brand, then Intel has market power over Apple.
If you look at Apple switching 100% to Intel, and even though we are not privy to their contracts, we do know from direct observation, Apple switched 100% to Intel, received favorable first vendor access to new technologies, some preference for customized variants, and lowest available average price terms.
Either Intel is that good or Intel is that smart or Intel has that much market power.
The thing that bugs me about FTC and all regulators, is they are not going to Intel and saying, here are the 5 things that bug us, change them. They are hinting there are problems, telling Intel a small portion of the issue which they actively addressed, and withheld information and baited them so they could have something to file in public to justify their existence. Remember in administrative matters such as this, the regulator has exceptionally wide range of authority, discretion, and jurisdiction to a wide range of remediation, and it is effectively a monologue in administrative court since the "standard of justice", is not even preponderance of the evidence, but "presumption of expertise" by the regulator. The regulator employees themselves rule on such cases. Therefore any filing is a MONOLOGUE. That is NOT justice. It is governmental rape of a citizen. When you add that to baiting tactics, it is a sneak attack too.
I am in no way defending Intel or the allegations. I am saying the government is using tactics no firm or citizen could comply with, or withstand, or employ any other tactic than have a stick rammed up their . . . . .
corporation
Rocketman
I am totally against out of control government regulators, but I am also against certain companies trying to utilize the government as a weapon against other companies. F.e., Sun Micro vs MSFT.
No, that is Apple objecting a particular DEAL because MS would flood the education market with free stuff.
Does something similar explain why Itunes is so slow on Windows?
Apple intentionally cripples iTunes & Safari on Windows to get people to switch over to Mac PCs. Dastardly!
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that it has filed suit against Intel, claiming that the company has "illegally used its dominant market position for a decade to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly." The complaint focuses not only on Intel's actions in the CPU market to shut out competitors such as AMD, but also on newer, similar actions in the graphics chip market.
THANK GOD. I love Intel proc's but they really deserved this. Plus, they can't make onboard graphics worth @#$%. NVIDIA and ATI should be the ones fighting over that. This is awesome news!
It is the government that encourages and allows it to "get publicity".
If regulation were the actual goal, whenever a regulator suspected a regulatory breach, they would inform the party with a letter and suggest a course of action to prevent a problem.
If regulators were interested in reliable operation of firms, they would issue permits like UK does where a permit is an authorization to engage in an activity, to exercise judgement, to report to regulators issues and problems that arise to negotiate a real-time solution, and continue their "art and commerce".
Our government issues permits at all levels of government an entirely different way. A permit is typically a waiver from enforcement from a narrow range of laws or regulations, and compliance is still required on all unaddressed aspects of law and regulation, which is nearly impossible to fully research, or even comply with after researching. So the regulators and prosecutors may still employ "selective enforcement" whenever political conditions change. So a "permit" is maleable, variable, and of very little protection.
We need real permits in this country. We need regulators who voluntarily surrender their legal standing of "presumed expert" in any administrative or court proceeding, or compelled so by legislation.
The current system is broke, nobody even intends to fix it, and it is getting more obscure, more punative, more complicated, and more all encompassing. This does not even resemble a free market.
Rocketman
Don't believe me? Read the Federal Register for a week. You will never get that part of your life back.
There are many different X86 compilers out there. The X86 architecture is really just an instruction set, and thus companies/developers are free to create their own X86 compiler that will determine how to process the instruction set code.
Both Intel and AMD add extensions to the architecture, and thus companies usually have to try and support the extensions that both companies add (at least, that's if the developers want the software to run as efficiently as possible on either an Intel or AMD processor).
The problem is that, as far as I know, when AMD adds extensions, they have to offer the extensions to Intel under the terms of their licensing agreement for X86. However, I'm not certain if Intel is required to do the same. The compiler would then have to be able to handle these extensions.
What Intel is partly accused of doing, is basically taking their X86 compiler, which ideally would be optimized for both Intel and AMD processors (if you're doing fair competitive testing, after all) and optimizing it so that performance was seen to be greater on their own products under a "comparative testing environment".
Someone such as cmaier (who has far more experience in this field) may want to correct me on this, but I believe it's perfectly legal to have an optimized compiler if its optimized to support any new extensions added to the instruction set. So, for example, let's say Intel had just added in SSE4 support, and AMD hadn't yet implemented it. Intel is perfectly justified in using a compiler optimized for SSE4 and showing the performance enhancements as a result.
My guess as to what Intel actually did (and I haven't read the full complaint, so this is only from what I've seen on the surface) is that they actually modified the compiler to not be able to handle certain functions of AMD's X86 line. Thus, Intel was saying "Hey, all things being equal as much as possible, our system performs better!", when in reality, they had crippled AMD X86 support.
If that is the case, it reminds me somewhat of what nVidia pulled during the GeForce FX fiasco, where in game-based benchmarks its performance was being trounced by the Radeon 9*** series, but in 3DMark the FX had a suprisingly high score. It was later revealed that nVidia had optimized their drivers to produce an artificially high 3DMark score, so as to lessen the negative press they were getting amongst review sites and enthusiasts.