FTC Introduces New Orders For Intel; No Bundling 155
eldavojohn writes "Today a decision was handed down (PDF) from the FTC that underlined new guidelines for Intel in the highly anticipated investigation. Biggest result: the practices Intel employed, like bundling prices to get manufacturers like Dell to block sales of competitors' chips, must stop. No word yet on whether or not Intel will face monetary fines from the FTC like they did in Europe over the same monopolistic practices."
Re:Does this mean an AMD Dell is on the horizon? (Score:3, Informative)
At least back when I last looked, the convention seemed to be that the model numbers ending in "1" were AMDs, while the ones ending in "0" were intels, ie. the Inspiron 530 was a basic consumer desktop tower. The Inspiron 531 was the otherwise similar model; but AMD based.
Re:Does this mean an AMD Dell is on the horizon? (Score:3, Informative)
Oops, nm it seems they have gotten back together after Dell canceled a line of AMD computers back in 2006.
Re:FTC (Score:3, Informative)
Then why doesn't my monthly bill go down when my 2-year contract is up? If I'm paying for part of the phone every month for 2 years, when the phone is paid off, my bill should go down.
Why this hasn't been investigated by the FTC yet I don't understand.
Re:So what does it mean for us? (Score:5, Informative)
he's talking about 2011/2012 when intel and AMD start packaging CPU's and GPU's in a single die on a regular basis, right now it's part of arrandale (the 32 nm i5's). I'm presuming he's just misinformed that this doesn't happen now on everything. Or he's making a bad joke about how people don't know the difference between a CPU and the whole computer case.
For AMD this is part of their 'the future is fusion' marketing. I can't recall what Intel has called it. Basically rather than a processor core you get a GPU core. So an 8 core, or 4 core machine can really be a collection of CPU and GPU cores. In the short term this isn't likely to impact a lot of /. readers on their home systems, since you can power, and cool about 1200 mm^2 of chips, split between cpu and GPU but if you want cheap, or cool 'fusion' is a good strategy. It's not like most computer actually need or want a decent (hot) GPU anyway.
As a game development guy I'm strongly opposed to intel gpu's in home users machines. They buy crap and then don't know why stuff doesn't work. But the business desktop is a whole other matter.
Re:So what does it mean for us? (Score:4, Informative)
The benchmarks I've seen show even an i5 being competitive with a Phenom II X6
I am backing up my assertions. [cpubenchmark.net]
Intel does not have any i5 that is even close in performance with the higher end 1090T, which is what the poster you were replying to said he was talking about. Read that? Not Even Close.
The lower end 1055T (which you are talking about) also beats the best performing i5, the 760, and it is cheaper than Intels chip too.
On top of that, the OEM special-edition 1035T, even cheaper than the 1055T, also outperforms all the i5's.
The only thing the i5 does better than the AMD 6 core offerings is better single threaded integer performance (and thats only the best most expensive i5), but is worse at single threaded floating point. For multi-threaded tasks it gets literally destroyed by AMD's 6-core offerings.
Re:So what does it mean for us? (Score:3, Informative)
The Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs have the GPU directly on die.
From http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei3/index.htm [intel.com] :
This processor comes equipped with Intel HD Graphics, an advanced video engine that delivers smooth, high-quality HD video playback, and advanced 3D capabilities, providing an ideal graphics solution for everyday computing.
From http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei5/index.htm [intel.com] :
Intel® HD Graphics on Intel® Core i5-600 processor series
Re:Does this mean an AMD Dell is on the horizon? (Score:3, Informative)
Probably not. Dell already used AMDs at some point in the past and canceled the line due to poor sales.
You mean because of the big under the table payment from Intel that they have been using as a slush fund so they can hit their numbers?