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AMD shares rose to a nearly six-year high [autoplaying video] ahead of its December 13th preview of the company's Zen chips, and amid rumors that AMD will license its integrated graphics technology to Intel:
Nvidia and Intel began suing each other in 2009 over Nvidia's nForce chipsets for Intel CPUs. The suits were eventually settled in 2011: Nvidia agreed not to build chipsets for Intel's Core i7 CPUs, and Intel was free to build graphics cores without getting sued by Nvidia. The price of Intel's freedom was high, though: The chip giant agreed to pay Nvidia licensing fees over the next six years totalling $1.5 billion.
After writing the last $200 million check in January 2016, the licensing deal is winding down, which means Intel has to go shopping for patent protection for its graphics cores. As AMD and Nvidia essentially own the lion's share of graphics patents in the world, developing graphics cores is nigh impossible without licensing deals.
[...] Such a deal wouldn't come cheap, but Intel was already cutting checks of $200 million to $300 million to Nvidia every year. "Intel would have to pony up some significant money to make this deal work," Krewell told PCWorld. "The amount of extra cash AMD could make on royalties would be very appealing to the shareholders."
Fans may be concerned that such a deal would all but give up the last advantage AMD's upcoming Zen-based APUs would have over Intel chips. AMD's Zen core could equal Intel's newest cores in x86 performance. Combine that with AMD's much more powerful graphics cores and you'd have an instant winner. Financial realities, however, overshadow any moral victories. "Is it better to make a royalty on 80 percent to 90 percent of the PC processor shipments or fight it out for the remaining 10 percent or 20 percent?" Krewell said. AMD can make a lot more money partnering with Intel rather than competing.
Also at Nasdaq. Rumor source.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:39PM
I for one hope they do not partner in any way shape or form. We've gone from an ecosystem of graphics card manufacturers down to two. I'm sure there are still niche producers, but for general use we have AMD and Intel.
On a sidenote, I'd love to see open standards and dev tools for people to build their own drivers. Locking things down to specific OSes should be heresy for hardware producers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:43PM
As soon as the new administration is in office, Intel can buy AMD to kill the competitor and get the patents they need, with no risk of being stopped.
If anyone asks, they'll point to ARM as "the real threat to our business".
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:19PM
Talking of ARM, Fujitsu is dumping SPARC64 and moving to 64-bit ARM [top500.org] for its "Post-K Supercomputer." Of course, AMD has hedged its bets on ARM too.
I also heard a rumour that Oracle is canning Solaris development...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:45PM
AMD and Nvidia. For integrated GPUs, you are right, and it is Intel and AMD (Nvidia threw in the towel with 7xxx model IGPs, which might have actually been 6150 derived, like their previous IGP options.)
As far as I know there are no discrete GPU manufacturers left outside of AMD and Nvidia. The final two were the remenants of the Chrome GPU line (from S3?) and the Volari line from whoever that was, and outside of Via's CPU/Motherboard line, both have essentially died out, due to market mismanagement and lack of driver support.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:54PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:26PM
There were always two, for as long as I can remember. ATI, or Nvidia. And before that, Voodoo/3dfx and S3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @11:18PM
AMD (nee ATi), NVidia and Voodoo's 3Dfx marks your age, youngster.
Back in the day, before 3D became all the rage, there were the likes of ATi, Matrox, S3, Number 9, Cirrus, Trident, SiS, Tseng, and Ned-knows how many other small video chipset & card makers.
Why I still remember shelling out over $800 for a screaming 4MB Matrox Millennium for my, let's see, must have been a top-end 66MHz Pentium system at the time. Cost me over $1200 for the RAM alone to load that machine up with a jaw-dropping 16MB, it did.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Friday December 09 2016, @03:03AM
Marks my age? I remember when Hercules was a thing :)