RSSNvidia's licensing situation with AMD is just as bad as with Intel
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published April 23, 2009, 6:45 PM
During yesterday's unveiling of its accelerated roadmap for 12- and even 16-core processors, an AMD executive said he did not believe the licensing situation between his company and Nvidia would enable Nvidia to produce chipsets that support future AMD platforms. Specifically, it appears Nvidia is not yet licensed to produce motherboard chipsets that support AMD's next-generation processors, reducing the likelihood for multi-GPU SLI support for AMD's "Istanbul" and future generations.
"For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time," stated server business unit vice president Pat Patla. "We don't expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010."
Anyone spreading the rumor that Nvidia is looking to invest in Via Technologies may be thinking Nvidia could use a friend -- any friend -- about now. Its ability to produce chipsets for Intel's Nehalem platform remains on hold, perhaps permanently now that it has countersued Intel over its rights to say it supports Nehalem in interviews to the press. Perhaps Patla's statement that Nvidia will "support existing platforms" can be interpreted as the closest thing to an olive branch it's going to get, especially from the CPU maker that now owns its principal competitor.
Phil from AMD PR here, Just to clarify, AMD did not say anything related to future licensing in the context of nvidia's chipset support for AMD Opteron. It is strictly a business decision to move future server platforms on to AMD chipsets.
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|The solution: get VIA and use their license to make x86 CPU's and compete in the same field that Intel and ATI/AMD does.
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|This is one obvious situation where licensing does indeed bar competition. I am not a huge fan of NVIDIA, but we need them to be in the game to keep AMD/ATI in check.
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|Intel, AMD, and nVidia should not be able to lock each other or anyone else out of platform interoperability at this level.
Monoculture is dangerous and leads to stagnation of innovation through poor competition.
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|AMD will only allow AMD to support video, and Intel will not allow NVidia to support Intel?
I smell an anti-trust suit in the making. And this time it will be justified.
Its a shame that it appears both Intel and AMD desire to protect the market - but unfortunately they seem to want to do it with licensing restrictions - market protectionism - instead of by producing a superior product and competing.
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|Nvidia is just far too smart of a company to try to lock out. Personally I would not give them something like this to motivate & rally themselves around.
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|Can't we all just get along?
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|Do you mean 'we the consumers' or 'we the competing companies'? Unlikely in either case I would think.
If you mean "can we the consumer get on with the competing companies' - not in a near monopoly situation! Not given the desire of all monopolies to rape & pillage captive marketplaces in a way that makes Ghengis Khan look like a benign grandfather.
Unless of course you want to lie back and enjoy it...
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|Nvidia needs to Buy AMD. Screw the licensees. AMD SHARE PRICE is so low it might be easier for nvidia to buy AMD vs Licenses..
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|A long what? Motherboard? Hard drive? Power cable?
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