unconfirmed - Intel in talks with AMD over GPU patents

[zMeul]

source: http://seekingalpha.com/news/3168017-bloomberg-intel-talks-amd-license-gpu-patents

 

I'm having a hard time finding the original source of this claim, Bloomberg .. presumably

Quote

Bloomberg reports Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is in talks with AMD to license its smaller rival's GPU patents.

 

The report comes with Intel's cross-licensing deal with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) due to expire in Q1 2017.

 

is Intel searching, again, cross-licensing deals to enter the discrete graphics market? it's possible, they have the know-how, the technology and the manufacturing required for such an endeavor

 

but then again, they could just seek licences to refresh their iGPUs

 

---

 

a bit of clarification, since a lot of people jumped to conclusions

here's the nVidia - Intel cross license agreement: http://investor.nvidia.com/secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-11-5134&cik=1045810

it states that Intel and nVidia have granted each other all patents that are either owned or controlled by each party that have filing date on or before March 31 2017

with this stipulation: nVidia will not be granted licences to: microprocessors, chipsets and flash memory

this cross licence is valid until each individual patent covered under this deal will expire, or otherwise teminated

 

the above cross licence agreement is a direct result of the suit filed against nVidia by Intel, in 2009 - Intel was seeking declaratory and injunctive relief relating to a license agreement that the parties signed in 2004

[Jon Trollston]

31 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

AMD should go through with it, but only if Intel agrees to stop bribing software and game devs to limit usage on PC to 4 threads.

The consoles have 8 cores. Its stinking obvious.

Why would they do that? Intel makes cpu's with >4 cores too. Not to mention that intel has hyperthreading which is exclusive and as such, anything more than a dual core + hyperthreading would be able to use more than 4 threads. I think that the 4 thread limitation is mainly due to games being gpu bound rather than cpu bound and as such, enabling more cores/threads would achieve almost nothing. 

[Lethal Seraph]

Whatever Intel is cooking, I hope it's to fight against Nvidia. We need a 3rd man on GPU race.

[zMeul]

Just now, Lethal Seraph said:

Whatever Intel is cooking, I hope it's to fight against Nvidia. We need a 3rd man on GPU race.

whatever Intel is cooking they'll also fight AMD

and from all 3, AMD is the lowest in market share

[Lethal Seraph]

4 minutes ago, zMeul said:

whatever Intel is cooking they'll also fight AMD

and from all 3, AMD is the lowest in market share

A double-edged sword indeed. It could destroy them but same time present a leverage that can flourish what little AMD patents want to keep.

[TristanK]

4 minutes ago, Lethal Seraph said:

Whatever Intel is cooking, I hope it's to fight against Nvidia. We need a 3rd man on GPU race.

You really think they would stand a chance against Nvidia in GPU market? They should have one hell of a team of gpu experts to do that and since they never made a gpu that is any better than the lowest tier nvidia gpu I doubt they have the people and the know how to actually be competitive to Nvidia. Not that i would not like to see another player in GPU market but i doubt they ll go for that. It is like saying Nvidia is going to compete against Intel in CPU market...everyone would laugh because there is just no way that could happen anytime soon.....sad but true

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, TristanK said:

You really think they would stand a chance against Nvidia in GPU market? They should have one hell of a team of gpu experts to do that and since they never made a gpu that is any better than the lowest tier nvidia gpu I doubt they have the people and the know how to actually be competitive to Nvidia. Not that i would not like to see another player in GPU market but i doubt they ll go for that. It is like saying Nvidia is going to compete against Intel in CPU market...everyone would laugh because there is just no way that could happen anytime soon.....sad but true

seems you haven't heard of Larrabee - even when Intel gave the job to some idiots cropping up a GPU on their knees, they still managed to scare nVidia

[TristanK]

actually the only good way to compete against Nvidia in my oppinion is to merge AMD and Intel together and get a supercompany and than we would get even more awesome CPU's because they would join forces and better GPU's for the same reason.....but bad side of that is knowing Intel would now have no competition at all in CPU market and that would suck big time

[TristanK]

Just now, zMeul said:

seems you haven't heard of Larrabee - even when Intel gave the job to some idiots cropping up a GPU on their knees, they still managed to scare nVidia

I actually haven't heard of that...but still they haven't made much to show that they could be competitive to Nvidia in GPU market...Perhaps I m wrong...those re just my thoughts

[Lethal Seraph]

7 minutes ago, TristanK said:

-snip-

True, there's not really a whole lot of incentive for Intel to get into gpu race. But to think a company valued at $150b can't compete to someone valued to a fraction of that is bonkers.

[zMeul]

7 minutes ago, TristanK said:

I actually haven't heard of that...but still they haven't made much to show that they could be competitive to Nvidia in GPU market...Perhaps I m wrong...those re just my thoughts

Larrabee grew up to be Xeon-Phi

 

isn't unthinkable that Intel could re-engineer the Xeon-Phi back into a GPU

[porina]

To me it does look like this is to ensure continuation of being able to make integrated GPUs.

 

GPUs tend to be easily scalable. More units, more power. As a thought exercise, I wonder how would a hypothetical intel GPU perform if you took their integrated cores and scaled up the quantity comparable to the higher end from red/green, and gave it a good dose of dedicated vram? A possible way to do this is look at Broadwell/Crystalwell performance against a comparable APU, then compare that APU with higher end. 

[Dabombinable]

Considering the way Ati/AMD/Radeon Technologies has been in the past, hopefully this shouldn't turn out like the Nvidia debacle where Nvidia bitched and moaned.

[Trixanity]

If this was to happen, I'd imagine AMD requiring more than a little compensation. I'd think that AMD would try to make this deal in their favor especially considering who's knocking on their door asking for a deal that they absolutely need. 

 

 

[Notional]

2 hours ago, huilun02 said:

AMD should go through with it, but only if Intel agrees to stop bribing software and game devs to limit usage on PC to 4 threads.

The consoles have 8 cores. Its stinking obvious.

Most modern games uses more. The Division for instance easily uses 8 threads.

3 hours ago, zMeul said:

source: http://seekingalpha.com/news/3168017-bloomberg-intel-talks-amd-license-gpu-patents

 

I'm having a hard time finding the original source of this claim, Bloomberg .. presumably

 

is Intel searching, again, cross-licensing deals to enter the discrete graphics market? it's possible, they have the know-how, the technology and the manufacturing required for such an endeavor

 

but then again, they could just seek licences to refresh their iGPUs

This seems very odd. GPU is the biggest "cash cow" (if you could say AMD has a such). Allowing Intel into this area makes little sense, especially if Intel is going to focus on the professional/server market.

However considering most GPU's on the market are intel integrated, I see why AMD would want a piece of the pie. However one of the biggest reasons why ZEN would be a great competitor, is the fact that it has superior graphics. Both in gaming, but also things like HDR support, proper driver support, etc.

I understand AMD would like a steady income, but it's also one that might eat away a great pro in their upcoming ZEN processors. That would be a bad move.

[That Norwegian Guy]

2 hours ago, Jon Trollston said:

Why would they do that? Intel makes cpu's with >4 cores too. Not to mention that intel has hyperthreading which is exclusive and as such, anything more than a dual core + hyperthreading would be able to use more than 4 threads

Eh, no. Hyperthreading only helps with highly repetitive or predictable workloads (static rendering of video/ 3D/ audio, compression and decompression, database sorting etc.) and as such the only game technique it will actually help with is Generation 1 tesselation (back when tesselation was done by CPU and not GPU) which is extinct already. (Battlefield 3, The Secret World and Crysis 2 + 3 had it)

 

People who bought a 4-core i7 for gaming only wasted $100 to lower their OC range.

[Jon Trollston]

10 minutes ago, That Norwegian Guy said:

Eh, no. Hyperthreading only helps with highly repetitive or predictable workloads (static rendering of video/ 3D/ audio, compression and decompression, database sorting etc.) and as such the only game technique it will actually help with is Generation 1 tesselation (back when tesselation was done by CPU and not GPU) which is extinct already. (Battlefield 3, The Secret World and Crysis 2 + 3 had it)

 

People who bought a 4-core i7 for gaming only wasted $100 to lower their OC range.

right, so the only difference between an i5 and an i7 is the core count? No. 

[LucidMew]

2 hours ago, zMeul said:

seems you haven't heard of Larrabee - even when Intel gave the job to some idiots cropping up a GPU on their knees, they still managed to scare nVidia

and what idiots they were. Internal politics and insults being thrown left and right.

http://vrworld.com/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed/

Quote

 "the group in Braunschweig, Germany are seriously a bunch of dip-shits with undeserved chips on their shoulder! It’s really a corrupt corporate culture in this office."

 

2 hours ago, zMeul said:

Larrabee grew up to be Xeon-Phi

 

isn't unthinkable that Intel could re-engineer the Xeon-Phi back into a GPU

But the Xeon-Phi is a Co-Processor, and requires a special compiler in order for code to be run on them.

[AlTech]

17 minutes ago, Jon Trollston said:

right, so the only difference between an i5 and an i7 is the core count? No. 

Cache, Graphics and logical core count.

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, Notional said:

Most modern games uses more. The Division for instance easily uses 8 threads.

To be fair, the Snowdrop engine is really well optimized.

[patrickjp93]

4 hours ago, huilun02 said:

AMD should go through with it, but only if Intel agrees to stop bribing software and game devs to limit usage on PC to 4 threads.

The consoles have 8 cores. Its stinking obvious.

Bribing? Please tell me you don't actually believe this. Intel (co)invented easy multithreading all the way back in 1999 and then released it as an open standard called OpenMP. No one in the world has pushed multicore programming as hard as Intel. However, the software ecosystem has not evolved much faster than a snail's pace, so Intel sells the hardware which best suits it since its main business is in selling hardware. It won't wound future sales the way AMD did to itself by releasing 8-core chips way before the ecosystem is ready for them to be cheap. That said, the tools exist for game devs to easily create software that scales to an infinite core count. The fact they don't use these tools should infuriate everyone. Blaming Intel is just asinine.

[patrickjp93]

55 minutes ago, LucidMew said:

and what idiots they were. Internal politics and insults being thrown left and right.

http://vrworld.com/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed/

 

But the Xeon-Phi is a Co-Processor, and requires a special compiler in order for code to be run on them.

I wouldn't call GCC or Clang special. Microsoft (and Portland Group) is the only one behind in the big 4 (5).

[Jon Trollston]

39 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Cache, Graphics and logical core count.

Exactly. That's my point. 

[patrickjp93]

1 hour ago, That Norwegian Guy said:

Eh, no. Hyperthreading only helps with highly repetitive or predictable workloads (static rendering of video/ 3D/ audio, compression and decompression, database sorting etc.) and as such the only game technique it will actually help with is Generation 1 tesselation (back when tesselation was done by CPU and not GPU) which is extinct already. (Battlefield 3, The Secret World and Crysis 2 + 3 had it)

 

People who bought a 4-core i7 for gaming only wasted $100 to lower their OC range.

No, it helps with highly varied workloads. If your parallelized workload just uses the same ALUs across all 4 main threads and the hyperthreads, you gain no extra performance. Depending on your program hierarchy and how often threads are generated, you may in fact lose performance to a significant degree.

[patrickjp93]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

If this was to happen, I'd imagine AMD requiring more than a little compensation. I'd think that AMD would try to make this deal in their favor especially considering who's knocking on their door asking for a deal that they absolutely need. 

 

 

Intel doesn't absolutely need it. It just reduces time to market by a good degree. If Zen or Polaris is a flop, AMD could collapse in bankruptcy in 2019 due to a complete lack of cash to pay off its debt held to JP Morgan (even excluding the big chunk Intel holds since it had to co-finance the ATI buyout). In that event, Intel would be the one to buy up the graphics IP.