Would we all be screwed if AMD went bust, or would the law intervene?

[Guest lilbman]

13 hours ago, pipnina said:

Oil is different to computers though. You can own land which you use to drill (or whatever you do) oil. Then the oil works the same for everyone. With computers, if you aren't compatible, you're useless. And you won't be made compatible without effort from developers, which need to put effort in to make you compatible. Which means you could create a small oil field that the big guy hasn't thought of yet and maybe even sell for cheaper. With computers, you are required by law to sell "oil" that isn't compatible with "Standard oil" if you want to sell it at all. And because you aren't compatible, and none of the "car manufacturers" will support someone who makes up 0.1% of the market, you die.

 

Lol I wasn't going to go into that much of detail when comparing the two.  My point is that a free market will work itself out in time.

13 hours ago, pipnina said:

And because you aren't compatible, and none of the "car manufacturers" will support someone who makes up 0.1% of the market, you die.

I'm going to compare the car manufacturers you mentioned with computer manufacturers like Asus, Dell, and Apple.  If that company that makes up 0.1% of the market has something better for the consumer than the other 99.9% of the market, then the consumer will start to buy from that smaller company.  If computer manufacturers find an OS that the consumer prefers over the one they are currently using, then they will start pre-loading it onto their computers and buying from that company instead of the previous one.

 

 

 

13 hours ago, pipnina said:

you won't be made compatible without effort from developers, which need to put effort in to make you compatible.

If the consumer prefers, or rather demands, that developers start to use the less supported thing, it will be supported by way of popular demand.  It would be like every Windows user switching over to Linux. Developers and manufacturers would start to make more Linux supported stuff than Windows supported things by way of popular analogy.

 

13 hours ago, pipnina said:

With computers, if you aren't compatible, you're useless.

Linux or MacOS isn't compatible with everything Windows is, yet people still use them.  

 

13 hours ago, pipnina said:

This is why a totally free market, while good in principle, doesn't work in the modern age. Regulations are necessary to prevent the most important technologies being controlled by a small handful of companies. The opposite of a free market would be worse than a totally free one but neither side is preferable, there is a middle ground that should be reached.

But it can work.  

 

Lets say two companies named X and Y have control over the most important technologies in the industry and are charging consumers an arm and a leg for it.  Along comes company Z that can do the exact same thing as X and Y can but with different technology.  People start to buy company Z's product instead of X and Y's because it benefits the consumer a lot more than company X and Y's technology can.  These two sides start competing for the same audience, and lets say Z wins over the majority of the audience and then the other side dies off.  Now Z owns 95% of the market.

 

Some time later, Z now owns only 60% of the market because they couldn't hold up the monopoly and now a different company is growing because they can offer the same thing but for a better deal for the consumer.

 

There is something called market forces that come into play. Economically speaking, people cannot do whatever they want and succeed because they know that someone can counteract them.  That's why it's important for companies and businesses to give the consumer the best they can offer for a good price (cough cough Intel).

 

In the end, the market regulates itself because it adapts to what the consumer wants. If people want something, developers and those in the tech industry will adapt to support it.  I get that comparing the tech industry and the oil industry aren't close when you dig into it, but the forces that come into play when influencing both markets are relatively the same.

 

Plus, most stuff that the government does that most citizens can do themselves without help just ends up getting screwed up.

 

[pipnina]

2 hours ago, lilbman said:

Lol I wasn't going to go into that much of detail when comparing the two.  My point is that a free market will work itself out in time.

I'm going to compare the car manufacturers you mentioned with computer manufacturers like Asus, Dell, and Apple.  If that company that makes up 0.1% of the market has something better for the consumer than the other 99.9% of the market, then the consumer will start to buy from that smaller company.  If computer manufacturers find an OS that the consumer prefers over the one they are currently using, then they will start pre-loading it onto their computers and buying from that company instead of the previous one.

 

 

 

If the consumer prefers, or rather demands, that developers start to use the less supported thing, it will be supported by way of popular demand.  It would be like every Windows user switching over to Linux. Developers and manufacturers would start to make more Linux supported stuff than Windows supported things by way of popular analogy.

 

Linux or MacOS isn't compatible with everything Windows is, yet people still use them.  

 

But it can work.  

 

Lets say two companies named X and Y have control over the most important technologies in the industry and are charging consumers an arm and a leg for it.  Along comes company Z that can do the exact same thing as X and Y can but with different technology.  People start to buy company Z's product instead of X and Y's because it benefits the consumer a lot more than company X and Y's technology can.  These two sides start competing for the same audience, and lets say Z wins over the majority of the audience and then the other side dies off.  Now Z owns 95% of the market.

 

Some time later, Z now owns only 60% of the market because they couldn't hold up the monopoly and now a different company is growing because they can offer the same thing but for a better deal for the consumer.

 

There is something called market forces that come into play. Economically speaking, people cannot do whatever they want and succeed because they know that someone can counteract them.  That's why it's important for companies and businesses to give the consumer the best they can offer for a good price (cough cough Intel).

 

In the end, the market regulates itself because it adapts to what the consumer wants. If people want something, developers and those in the tech industry will adapt to support it.  I get that comparing the tech industry and the oil industry aren't close when you dig into it, but the forces that come into play when influencing both markets are relatively the same.

 

Plus, most stuff that the government does that most citizens can do themselves without help just ends up getting screwed up.

 

Part of the problem is that consumers don't necessarily know what they're buying. Humans are very specialized creatures in the 21st century: We can have one that knows 1000s of astronomical objects by heart, studies many of them for obscure physics theories and general cosmology knowledge. They can also do that without knowing fuck all about computers. If they spend their whole lives studying something that ISN'T computers, they don't have any time left to work out that comcast's change x is bad, or intel's feature y is bad, they just go down to PC world, buy the first PC the sales assistant talks them into buying and get on with their lives. Regardless of whether other products were better for them.

 

When it comes to people who design large systems for organizations like universities, they just talk to DELL, rent out 1000 of something reasonably priced and powerful from them and call it a day on that front. They can't order parts or build 1000 computers themselves. If Microsoft happens to have deals with DELL/HP that's the business market given a huge bias to windows machines.

 

The only times I've EVER seen Mac machines out in a professional setting was for estate agents front-end staff (they look flashy after all) and when colleges decide the art students will do better with macs. Which probably means one of their senior managers was a Mac fanboy.

 

And yet, for many things, Linux systems are far superior to Windows OR Mac systems for certain corners of education. You will almost NEVER find it used. Why? Is it lack of technical support (Like you'd get from Apple/Microsoft?) No, redhat offers that with RHEL. Is it technical issues? No, Linux is better suited to networked environments and is easier "locked down" for education use than windows or macos.

And yet Linux is 100x better for programming than windows could ever be. 100s of libraries are in package managers, it comes with C/++ & assembler compilers by default, and can even install an industry standard web server straight from the package manager. You don't even have to reboot for it to work. The benefits for students on tech courses are numerous and not trivial. But you'll probably never find a Linux box supplied by a University because they care more about Word documents being perfectly formatted to their "standards" than actual learning.

[Sauron]

Not a lot of people know this in the consumer space, but VIA also has the x86 license.

 

Aside from that, if AMD goes under even if intel were forced to license their IP to someone else it would take years before that someone would be able to produce somwething even remotely competitive without the years of research and expertise both intel and AMD put into their cpus. CPUs have become so complex that it's extremely difficult for a new contender to enter the playing field.

15 hours ago, Drak3 said:

AMD goes under, and AMD's IP goes up to auction or gets acquired completely by Intel. In the first instance, if Samsung, NVidia, and Apple get all the IP spilt between them, we have potentially 3 new x86 manufacturers. If Intel acquires it all, they're split into multiple companies by the US Govt., but likely will form a cartel or still act as one company under the table.

Buying AMD does not guarantee intel will grant you access to the x86 license. It's specified in the contract they have with AMD, if the company gets bought out new terms will have to be negotiated. Besides, it's likely none of the companies you mentioned would care to have it. Apple has been rumored to be looking into producing their own arm based cpus for their macs for a while, samsung and nvidia already have an arm based product (and nvidia doesn't seem particularly keen on developing that line of business much further) and if they were to buy AMD it would be to acquire their top engineers more than anything else.

[Mira Yurizaki]

So I'm not a legal expert and will speculate.

 

Intel can always claim that ARM and those who making implementations of it are competitors. And as long as Intel doesn't do something like jack up their prices to unreasonable degrees, they can remain. Or at the very least, subject to a ton of government regulation. Privately held utility companies have effective monopolies in various regions but are allowed to exist due to regulation (plus it's impractical. If you had 3 different utility companies, they'd all have to build their own infrastructure in overlapping regions... which can be an issue) Or that may not happen, depending on what governments think

 

There's an interesting case in the US where Staples, an office supply company, bought out The Office Depot, another office supply company. Effectively Staples bought its only brick-and-mortar competitor. I believe Staples's excuse was that it had other competitors, mostly in the online front.

[xentropa]

6 hours ago, lilbman said:

Lol I wasn't going to go into that much of detail when comparing the two.  My point is that a free market will work itself out in time.

I'm going to compare the car manufacturers you mentioned with computer manufacturers like Asus, Dell, and Apple.  If that company that makes up 0.1% of the market has something better for the consumer than the other 99.9% of the market, then the consumer will start to buy from that smaller company.  If computer manufacturers find an OS that the consumer prefers over the one they are currently using, then they will start pre-loading it onto their computers and buying from that company instead of the previous one.

 

 

 

If the consumer prefers, or rather demands, that developers start to use the less supported thing, it will be supported by way of popular demand.  It would be like every Windows user switching over to Linux. Developers and manufacturers would start to make more Linux supported stuff than Windows supported things by way of popular analogy.

 

Linux or MacOS isn't compatible with everything Windows is, yet people still use them.  

 

But it can work.  

 

Lets say two companies named X and Y have control over the most important technologies in the industry and are charging consumers an arm and a leg for it.  Along comes company Z that can do the exact same thing as X and Y can but with different technology.  People start to buy company Z's product instead of X and Y's because it benefits the consumer a lot more than company X and Y's technology can.  These two sides start competing for the same audience, and lets say Z wins over the majority of the audience and then the other side dies off.  Now Z owns 95% of the market.

 

Some time later, Z now owns only 60% of the market because they couldn't hold up the monopoly and now a different company is growing because they can offer the same thing but for a better deal for the consumer.

 

There is something called market forces that come into play. Economically speaking, people cannot do whatever they want and succeed because they know that someone can counteract them.  That's why it's important for companies and businesses to give the consumer the best they can offer for a good price (cough cough Intel).

 

In the end, the market regulates itself because it adapts to what the consumer wants. If people want something, developers and those in the tech industry will adapt to support it.  I get that comparing the tech industry and the oil industry aren't close when you dig into it, but the forces that come into play when influencing both markets are relatively the same.

 

Plus, most stuff that the government does that most citizens can do themselves without help just ends up getting screwed up.

 

 

This may work more in an industry that wasn't structurally dependent.

 

The problem with trying to change the CPU market is the remaining 90% of the industry built on it.  If you want to compete with a new CPU architecture, that would require the entire hardware, semiconductor, OS, software industry to move as well.  Unless your "new technology" can somehow offset the entire costs of loss in productivity for switching to a new technology that hasn't even been field tested, it's not going to work.  

 

We've seen several examples where competing formats in the computer industry (including within microarchitectures and programming languages) have just done nothing but crash the industry, since nobody was sure which platform would serve as the foundation for the future to build on.

 

Making computer chips has a huge entry barrier as well.  To get a factory that can produce CPU chips at Intel's volume, would require close to 40 billion dollars.  Intel's builds just enough factories to meet consumer demands.  If one has to build their own factory to make chips (because intel won't make chips for competitors), with the contemplation of taking away intel's customers and when there isn't a larger demand for chips, that would only just hurt the industry as a whole, since more and more factors would just run idle without new customers, which would carry the full social, environmental costs without generating additional revenue.