Intel and Skype Exclude AMD 492
Raenex writes "CNET is reporting that Intel and Skype have signed an exclusive deal that would cap the number of conference call members on all but Intel architecture. Skype will only offer 10-way conference calls on specific Intel chips while other chips, including all AMD chips, will only offer 5-way conference calls. From the article: 'Though few would argue that a niche feature like that is going to be a deal breaker for most PC buyers, the importance of the Skype-Intel alliance goes well beyond VoIP conferencing. Indeed, it's the latest, and certainly most prominent, example of Intel's new take on marketing: Lock in software partners as well as the PC makers.'"
Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
Gatta start watchin Intel's sucker punches.
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
Another sink-the-company idea from Intel. (Score:5, Insightful)
An Intel marketing person thought this was a good idea. He is one of those who knows nothing about technical things; he's just a marketing drone. What could he possibly do to advance the strength of his company? Nothing. So, to pretend that he was contributing he turned to evil. He made a deal that looks good to other know-nothings like himself, and is really, really offensive to the people who matter.
This is a violation of the anti-trust laws, I think.
New Intel mottos:
Intel: When you can't compete, be adversarial.
Intel: We're on the way down.
Intel: A technical company controlled by people with no technical knowledge.
Intel's present adversarial behavior is part of a gradual decay of the company that is more than 10 years old, in my experience. Perhaps 10 years ago, Intel arranged a pay cut for employees just before they began to do record business. During that time, Intel has done some really, really disgusting things, like trash their consumer products division by not paying enough attention to it.
Re:Low Blow (Score:4, Informative)
Gatta start watchin Intel's sucker punches.
You mean you're only beginning to watch now?
This is just the latest round in Intel's ongoing anti-competetive war against AMD [theinquirer.net].
Re:Low Blow (Score:4, Interesting)
If I were Intel I would have waited until that particular competitor was no longer suing me for anti-competitive behavior before adding more weight to their argument...But that's just me.
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
In this situation, intel is offering incentives to a software manufacturer to cripple their product on a competitors hardware. I agree that a competing product could be released that didn't have this arbitrary restriction, but I think it is clearly anti-competitive behavior that it was released in the first place.
Re:Low Blow (Score:4, Insightful)
See, the only difference between competitive behavior and anticompetitive behavior is that anticompetitive behavior isn't innovation; it's simply trying to squash the competition.
Further, you have to ask, what does Skype get out of all this?
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition is making a better product or doing it for a cheaper price. Anti-competition is forcing people to use your product by artificially limiting another product that people want to only work with yours. This is just a bullying tactic. Now, Skype with 10-way conferencing isn't exactly a big stick, but it's still a stick we're being hit with. But the principle is even worse than some of Microsoft's monopolistic tactics. It's not just integration or bundling, it'd be more like only allowing Windows to play mp3 files above 128 kbps using Windows Media Player and artificially crippling others. (The fact that it's two companies here instead of two MS departments doesn't make much of a difference to the harm to the end user.)
I'm wondering if they factored in the anti-marketing this does for them. I'm less interested in using Intel and Skype products now.
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Interesting)
of the mentality it conveys.
They were out the day they got bought by ebay.
Good to see they are actually helping themselves die now.
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Insightful)
While you are not strictly wrong, you are out of context. You've defined competition in the most generic, generalized sense, not in the market sense, and don't accept that it can mean something else in another context. By your definition violations of anti-trust laws can still qualify as competition. But at least you'd have at least one major supporter [rechargermag.com] of your definition. (If you look, you'll even see that word "anti-competitive" used in the
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, he's completely right. Competition in the economic sense and as the justification of and reason for the efficiency of a capitalistic free market economy is narrow competition with quality and price, driving efficiency of resource allocation.
You can 'compete' in other ways, as a game of 'winning' or 'losing', but as you step out of pure economic competition you are actively damaging the economy and the wealth of your society as a whole by ac
Uninstalling Skype in Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Low Blow (Score:4, Informative)
"Under Battlefield 2, we're able to see a small 3% performance advantage over the Pentium M. However, compared to the Athlon 64 X2, the Core Duo does not stand a chance."
"What performance at lower resolutions does tell us is that in this type of AI/physics load, the Athlon 64 X2 is a much better performer than the Core Duo, which does have some importance for performance in future games."
And in the summary:
"In the past, power users on the go had to sacrifice mobility for CPU power, but with the Core Duo, that is no longer the case. You will still most likely have to resort to something larger if you need better GPU performance, but at least your CPU needs will be covered. The one thing that Intel's Core Duo seems to be able to do very well is to truly bridge the gap between mobile and desktop performance, at least in thin and light packages.
But what about the bigger picture? What does our most recent look at the performance of Intel's Core Duo tell us about future Intel desktop performance? We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. The only remaining exception at this point appears to be 3D games, where the Athlon 64 X2 continues to do quite well, most likely due to its on-die memory controller."
Based on that, I don't see how you can conclude that:
Itty, bitty mobile processor Yonah, at 2GHz, with no 64-bit extensions, kicks the bloody shit out of AMDs top of the line offering on almost all the benchmarks.
The Core Duo is impressive, no doubt about it. Near desktop performance with laptop-like power consumption (at least once Microsoft fixes XP so USB devices don't cause Windows to remain out of standby) but it seems you've gone a few too many laps 'round the Intel hype hampster-wheel. As a matter of fact, in direct opposition to your assertion, in all but one of the benchmarks Yonah trailed AMD's offerings. The gap wasn't generally tremendous, but it certainly was there. Yessir, that'd be kicking the bloody shit. Yup. Oh yes.
Re:Other industries do this (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, as long as you are only using non-DRM music in your iTunes, there's actually an API to allow other mobile devices to appear in iTunes (at least under Mac, and presumably so under Windows as well). My Windows Mobile PDA has an option in its synch software to appear in iTunes; I can then synch it just like an iPod, but any Fairplay music is disallowed.
Now, you're right that the iTunes Music Store requires you to have a Fairplay-
OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
The Skype OS X client is already somewhat lacking compared to its Win-counterpart.
Re:OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. - NOT QUITE (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. - NOT QUITE (Score:5, Interesting)
How? eBay is a service company. The only marketing I've seen is singing about buying crap off of eBay on TV and every single noun that I search for on Google, I can buy on eBay as well.
Back on topic, this is a _very_ bad move on Intel and Skype. I doubt that MS would even stoop so low.
A) Why would Skype agree to this? What is their benefit by limiting their customer base by splitting hairs on commodity CPU manufacturers?
b) Why would Intel do this when they are already being sued by AMD?
Is Sony involved in these decisions?
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. - NOT QUITE (Score:3, Funny)
The top ad off of this search, http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=bill+gates&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 [google.com] yields the text ad that says, "Bill Gate, Looking for Bill Gate?" with the following ad URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=l&ai=B-L2WiAvxQ7iWKqT iqQK0wf3XAqmhmRLdltOJAvvIjLUIwJoMEAEYASC5VCgHSJI5U J3b-KIDmAG9jgaqAQJlbsgBAZUCHXFKCg&num=1&q=http://a dfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/711-33994-2056-0%3Ftype% 3Dsearch%26mpre%3Dhttp%253A%252F%2 [google.com]
Re:IT'S TRUE!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:2)
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:2)
Comparing Napster to Skype is absurd. Napster failed because its business model, such as it was, depended on its customers violating copyright law, and it got sued into oblivion. Skype is providing a real, legitimate service to real people right now. It could of course still fail for many reasons, but not for the reasons Napster did. Skype is also backed by the very deep pockets of EBay.
Claiming that Skype will fail because it is based on a proprietary s
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, Skype isn't even on our radar. At least not with my company since we focus exclusively on VoIP for small businesses. And we love Vonage and the handful of other major players because they are leading the charge against regulation and fighting the legal battles with telcos. Plus their marketing saturation lends creditiblity to the concept of Internet telephony.
And to the GP
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:2)
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:2, Insightful)
Devices (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco has a good start on them though - but not the software, that's Skype.
This is going to be an interesting field to watch for the next five years.
Are they crazy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there is one way. I had the exact same thought as you did, right up until I realized something: Intel no longer has a monopoly in the processor market.
The conclusion that then follows is: There is no more anti-trust. Just competition.
Scary.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, there is one way. I had the exact same thought as you did, right up until I realized something: Intel no longer has a monopoly in the processor market.
The conclusion that then follows is: There is no more anti-trust. Just competition.
Actually...this behavior is called tying [aurorawdc.com]...which is also illegal.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:2)
IAANAL, but it may still be possible to argue
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Interesting)
In Europe it's product tying, which has been illegal for a while - if Skype try this there they'll be sued to oblivion by AMD under these laws.
Not sure about the US... I guess from the comments that there are no such laws there.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a pretty good site on US anti-trust law [stolaf.edu].
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
You got it backwards. Intel is not leveraging a (no longer existing) monopoly in the processor market to help Skype gain a monopoly in the VOIP market. Rather, it's the other way round: they are leveraging Skype's near monopoly in VOIP to bolster Intel's dying processor monopoly.
So the real question should be: are there today any credible competitors to Skype?
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes [gizmoproject.com]. Standards based, and is at least 37% less evil.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:2)
AMD's Opertron architecture finally managed to cream Intel at just the right transitional period. AMD is now leading development rather than following. I find that to be a rather shocking turn of events, especially on Intel's own property. (x86)
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants it.
At least, nobody wants it enough to pay a premium for it. Because a Linux pre-install is a *separate* product from the Windows pre-install, it doesn't get made for free. It actually costs the manufacturer to provide Linux pre-isntalls. If the demand for Linux pre-installs is high enough then the cost is worth it. But if not, it's a loss, and so the manufacturer stops providing that product line.
Linux users, as a whole, are perfectly capable of installing Linux on their own. Even if you did pre-install Linux, odds are the Linux user is going to slap on another distribution anyway. You might as well be marketing OS-less systems rather than Linux systems.
In short, the absence of Linux pre-installs on desktop machines from the large OEMs is not evidence of a dastardly conspiracy.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming for the sake of argument that the rest of your argument is cogent, how do you explain the lack of OS-free machines? Why can't I get the same machine with no OS for $50 less? I've got no problem installing Linux on my own, but as things stand I have to build a machine from parts to get it without paying for Windows.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
But the market IS FREE to decide the point. Just because they aren't deciding it the way you want it decided is beside the point. Volume discounts are legal, ethical and moral, regardless of the size of the company. A restriction on volume discounts requires government intervention into the marketplace, which makes the market unfree. These interventions typically take the form of arbitrary anti-trust decisions.
You CAN have a free market with anti-trust i
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
"keep others out" deal anymore?
10 years and people still don't get it...
1) Bulk/Bundle licensing has been around for a long freaking time, pre-Windows even.
2) It is the OEM's decision to buy the bulk licensing to include Windows, NOT Microsoft. Blame Dell, or whoever is making the computer, not the OS Vendor.
I was the head of a very successful company in the late 90s that competed against the Dells, Gateways, etc. WE CHOSE NOT TO DO THE BULK BUNDLING DEA
Solution.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Solution.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Skype is a an end-luser-only solution. This makes it the solution of choice for the rest of the Internet end-luser population until a better alternative comes along.
As far as the "limit conferencing to 5" this is quite an interesting twist. Conferencing is clearly a business feature. Very few consumers are interested in it. At th
Re:Solution.. (Score:2)
Enterprise it is not; maybe someday, but its not there yet.
wha? (Score:5, Funny)
Downright Disgusting (Score:3, Interesting)
sucker punch (Score:2)
Ya, well... uh... NO SOUP FOR YOU! (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to start the Class Action Law Suit (Score:2)
The one positive thing about this..... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd make a choice--but not on the hardware... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I wouldn't avoid buying a PC with an AMD chip. I pretty much buy all AMD now, and I plan to continue. I would, however, be sure to not use software that tries to dictate to me what type of hardware I use. I wonder if this will backfire on Skype?
Re:I'd make a choice--but not on the hardware... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't wonder. I recently signed up for skype, just because my family was on it and it was free. But I think it may be time to think about alternatives. Thing about a free service, it is really easy to walk away when they do stupid things like this. I can't possibly see why skype thought crippling its software would be good for business. And it really makes me think Intel is on its way out if they can't compete anymore on the merits of their products, but have to conspire with other businesses to exclude competition.
It is a sad day for those two companies.
It will just drive more people to... (Score:5, Funny)
It does conference calls really well and is not just free as in beer.
Corporate stupidity isn't always a bad thing. It's just a matter of letting them shoot themselves in the foot and then reaping the benefits of their pain.
MTW
Re:It will just drive more people to... (Score:2)
Re:It will just drive more people to... (Score:2)
It depends on where you are.. from the UK I can call most of the world for free (well a connect charge usually about 1p), including the US. Of course as it's a free market rather than a lockin like skype I have to keep an eye out for the best deal but I haven't paid for a call in about 2 years now.
Stupid move (Score:5, Insightful)
It also turns into bad PR for Skype for the tech community to find out that Skype intentionally hobbles their software.
Re:Stupid move (Score:2)
At the same time, I am certain that Skype management is very concerned with making money. I'm sure that money coming from Intel more than offset the potential cost of lost customers.
Re:Stupid move (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Skype was one of the early VoIP services, they have network effects [wikipedia.org] working in their favour (e.g. I "have to" use Skype because all my colleagues/friends and even clients already use it - it will now be quite difficult to switch in fact). I'm sure they realise this, I think it's already made them a bit lazy compared to their competitors, but I think they overestimate their position - there aren't that many Skype users yet that that a [new] competitor couldn't outgrow them. According to my Skype clie
Not unlike... (Score:2)
Not very smart... (Score:2)
"Wait, you mean to tell me that I can't get as many people on a conference call because I bought the wrong brand of CPU two years ago? Looks like I'm going to another service. Bye."
Processor Mask (Score:2)
Skype asks "What kind of CPU are you" - kernel reports Intel.
mplayer asks "What kind of CPU are you" - kernel reports AMD.
Re:Processor Mask (Score:2)
Re:Processor Mask (Score:5, Interesting)
So does World of Warcraft, but people still hack it from time to time. Up until now there hasn't been much of a reason for anyone to want to modify Skype, so it hasn't been in the crosshairs of the reverse engineering crowd.
Example: Attaching a normal windows debugger or using softice isn't the only way to trace execution. Even if the app attempts to detect a virtualized CPU (say vmware), a full emulator can be completely invisible -- just slower. qemu even supports a gdb socket connection.
Trying to prevent reverse-engineering is a never-ending arms race and I'm not sure Skype has the will to stick it out. Just witness sites like game copy world to see how effect anti-reverse-engineering technologies are.
We'll keep on saying it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We'll keep on saying it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Put your money where your mouth is. You can't say "use this" if "this" doesn't exist.
Re:We'll keep on saying it... (Score:3, Interesting)
HTH.
Re:We'll keep on saying it... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is true, but the only requirements of the GP were that it use "SIP or h.323 ... be installed and used easily, [and cope] ... with NAT routers transparency (sic)"
Gizmo is not open source, but it uses open standards (you can use it with asterisk! [voip-info.org]) and it is a heck of a lot better than skype.
Consequence of a non-free market (Score:2)
Unfortunately, Skype lacks real competition, so they can do this.
They need a viable competitor; right now the market isn't free, because people lack choice of provider, so the provider can get away with stuff like this.
It's a stupid move for Skype (Score:4, Insightful)
If we are to have antitrust laws, now is the time (Score:5, Insightful)
This is on a par with Ford and Exxon agreeing that unless you are burning Exxon gas your Ford's engine will be capped at half it's rated horsepower.
No conspiracy, there are technical reasons (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No conspiracy, there are technical reasons (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:2)
In a related announcement... (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid Rabbit! (Score:2)
E is for Ethics (Score:2)
not so sure it'll backfire on Skype (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of people are commenting that this is harmful to skype, but I'm not so certain. After all, Joe Sixpack will only know that he can conference call with all of his buddies with a intel machine, while AMD "can't handle it". The whole concept of software limitation is totally incomprehensible for the majority of the non-slashdot crowd.
AMD better start a massive PR campaign RIGHT NOW to make this backfire on Intel and Skype.
Libjingle (Score:2)
STUPID. (Score:2)
AMD has greater new market share now though (Score:2)
Also, feel free to give Skype a piece of your mind. They deserve it. http://www.skype.com/feedback/contact/ [skype.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Intel can no longer compete on a technology basis. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the sign of a company that is falling behind in their core markets.
Intel optimizations (Score:5, Informative)
If the code were optimized for SSE3, it would only run on recent Intel chips to begin with. I did not read anywhere in the article that said Intel paid to exclude AMD from approaching Skype to optimize their code for "AMD64" (x86-64). That said, the number of phone calls allowable should really be licensed on a per-CPU/core basis. If Skype honestly believes that Intel Duo chips with Intel's optimizations are truly twice as efficient as AMD's dual core chips, a license for 10 calls should be available for quad core AMD products. I have never been a fan of licensing by the number of CPUs, specifically disabling features if a host machine has fewer than X processors, but it has been in use for years.
It's absurd to assume that a machine with fewer than X processors/cores or of a slightly different architecture is not/will not be powerful enough to run suchandsuch a feature within a product's lifespan. They said that the exclusive 10-way calling feature will only be exclusive for a limited time, however. It may be in recognition that AMD64 chips will eventually be able to outperform even SSE3 optimized Intel code, if they cannot already.
Work around (Score:5, Interesting)
How hard would it be to create a dll that overrides getCPUId() and put that in front of skype's library path.
This really seems like a foolish way to conduct business.
"We don't offer you more, but we beat our competitors down with a stick so they offer you less"
Anti-Trust? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean... I guess the more appropriate question would be: "is this legal?" which of course begs the next question "can they get away with this even if it is?"
Or would this be considered "unethical but technically not illegal"?
Whatever it is, it smells really bad, and is IMHO a terrible PR move.
So contact Skype and voice your opinion (Score:3, Informative)
Just stupid; games on certain video cards (Score:3, Funny)
This is like some cars going faster on certain roads (ignoring speed limits here of course, I'm talking capability). Maybe one 'supported' platform for tech support, but why would anyone possibly want to tie an application to a specific processor? Who knows what the road may bring.
Next: Games that run on ATI-only video cards versus NVidia
-M
Re:Oh no... bloody murder! (Score:2)
Its moves like this that make me chose against the product rather than for it.
Re:Oh no... bloody murder! (Score:2)
Would my not liking it do anything about it? Probably not. Most people only see what works and what doesn't and aren't interested in why, but I'd
Re:Override? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Intel Outsiders (Score:2)
Windows only works on Intel CPUs?
Re:Heh, great. (Score:2)
Re:Heh, great. (Score:2)
Re:Heh, great. (Score:2)
Re:Intel is Scum (Score:2)