LinuxGram

Just about all Intel will be left with is its list price if the Federal Trade Commission gets its way.

The two dozen far-reaching remedies that the US regulator is demanding in the complaint it lodged Wednesday for Intel’s alleged decade of stifling competition to maintain its monopoly and now extend it to the GPU market are draconian.

Intel wouldn’t be able to offer volume discounts or bundled prices; optimize its widgetry if the optimization disadvantages rivals; have any say over who’s using its IP to produce chips; write licenses without the government guiding its hand; sue competitors’ third-party fabricators to protect its IP; or even restrict licenses in case control of the licensee changes hands.

It even looks like the FTC wants Intel to drop what Intel figures is billions of dollars worth of IP on Nvidia for nothing – like hand it an x86 license along with its interoperability secrets to create a third source. The FTC wants to micromanage Intel’s advertising and promotional materials, riffle through all tests, reports, studies and demonstrations, oversee its mergers and acquisitions, plus any consolidations or combination of assets.

Intel pushed back hard after the Federal Trade Commission sued it Wednesday. Obviously it had to.

Its shiny new general counsel Doug Melamed, a graduate of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the DOJ’s suit against Microsoft, accused the agency of basing its case on “unprecedented legal theories” and demanding “unprecedented remedies.”

The company called the agency’s case “misguided” and said “It is based largely on claims that the FTC added at the last minute and has not investigated. In addition, it is explicitly not based on existing law but is instead intended to make new rules for regulating business conduct. These new rules would harm consumers by reducing innovation and raising prices.”

The director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition Richard Feinstein begs to differ, but allowed there was a real-time component to the case and said Intel’s $1.25 billion settlement of AMD’s massive antitrust suit a month ago didn’t go far enough.

Intel was kinda sandbagged by the suit. Evidently it lost control of the situation in Washington.

According to the story it tells, it thought it was negotiating a voluntary settlement with the FTC until the regulator suddenly brought a swat of new issues revolving around GPUs, Intel’s CPU compiler and compiler-related benchmarks to the table – some of them just last week – Intel said, complaining that the agency had done no discovery or taken any depositions on these new charges and was simply repeating complaints coming from Nvidia.

According to Melamed the “case could have, and should have, been settled. Settlement talks had progressed very far but stalled when the FTC insisted on unprecedented remedies – including the restrictions on lawful price competition and enforcement of intellectual property rights set forth in the complaint – that would make it impossible for Intel to conduct business.”

He prophesied that “the FTC’s rush to file this case will cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to litigate issues that the FTC has not fully investigated. It is the normal practice of antitrust enforcement agencies to investigate the facts before filing suit. The Commission did not do that in this case.”

See http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9341/091216intelcmpt.pdf for the FTC’s complaint. The remedies start on page 19 and make quite a read if you can deal with the – ugh – language.

The agency is suing Intel for violating both Section 5 of the FTC Action and Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

One of FTC’s commissioners, Thomas Rosch, dissented from the decision to use Section 2 at all on what he called public policy grounds.

He said, “The collateral consequences of including any Section 2 claims are very unfavorable for both Intel and the Commission. Intel currently faces a treble damage suit by the New York Attorney General under Section 2 in the United States District Court in Delaware in addition to a number of Section 2 treble damage class actions that have been filed there. The Commission should not enable those plaintiffs to free ride off of the Commissions work. Nor should it put itself in a position where an unfavorable outcome in those cases may be cited against it.”

Intel has built an experimental fully programmable 48-core chip that it’s nicknamed the Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) and means to build at least a hundred more to pass out to industry and academic partners to use to develop new software applications and parallel programming models.

Microsoft, ETH Zurich, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois already have one and researchers from Intel, HP and Yahoo’s Open Cirrus initiative have already begun porting cloud applications to the widget using Hadoop, the Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications.

Internally Intel has ported web servers, physics modeling and financial analytics to the thing.

Intel says SCC, which runs Windows and Linux and so legacy software, is a research platform meant to work out the many kinks of multi-headed programming. It will never be a product.

However, Intel means to start integrating key features of the work in a new line of Core-branded chips early next year and introduce six- and eight-core processors later in 2010.

The SCC dingus – the most x86 engines ever pushed onto a single sliver of silicon – only consumes 25W-125W with all its little cores chugging away at maximum performance.

That’s the equivalent of a couple of light bulbs – or a Nehalem chip – thanks to newly invented fine-grain power management techniques and Intel believes it could reshape how computers are built and how people interact with their PCs and personal devices.

SCC incorporates technologies such as the power management and scale-out message-passing intended to scale to 100 cores and beyond but before such a device can go mainstream Intel’s got to understand better how to schedule and coordinate many cores.

Once that problem’s linked it believes laptops will be able to see objects and motion as it happens the same way a human being does and with a high degree of accuracy.

It says to imagine a world without keyboards, remote controls or joysticks because computers may be able to read brain waves, so simply thinking about a command, such as dictating words, would happen without speaking.

Or, if you figure you’ll be dead before that happens, imagine shopping online and seeing a “mirror” of yourself wearing the clothes you’re interested in and twirling to see how the fabric drapes and checking if the color complements your skin tone.

Very Jules Verne and gee-whiz but not any problem Intel is immediately trying to solve. It’s really trying to squeeze a container-based data center Cinderella-style into a rack.

Intel says it calls the futuristic chip a Single-Chip Cloud Computer because architecturally it resembles the organization of data centers used to create a cloud of computing resources over the Internet.

That means tens to thousands of computers connected by a physically cabled network, distributing large tasks and massive datasets in parallel. The chip uses the same approach, but all the computers and networks are integrated on a single piece of 45nm, high-k metal-gate silicon about the size of a postage stamp, dramatically reducing the amount of physical computers needed to create a cloud data center.

There’s a high-speed 256 GB/s network between the cores in the chip that Intel says significantly improves the communications performance and energy efficiency of the current data center model, since data packets only have to move a few millimeters on-chip instead of tens of meters to another computer system.

Applications will be able to use this low-latency mesh network to pass information directly between cooperating cores in microseconds, reducing the need to access data in slower off-chip system memory. Applications can also dynamically manage exactly which cores are used for a given task at a given time.

Each of the cores can run an operating system and Intel says software can turn each of the cores off and on and match their voltage and clock speed levels to the needs of the moment. Each dual core or tile can have its own frequency and groups of four tiles or eight cores can run at their own voltage.

In a canned quote, Dan Reed, Microsoft’s corporate VP of extreme computing, remarked that “Our early research with the single chip cloud computer prototype has already identified many opportunities in intelligent resource management, system software design, programming models and tools, and future application scenarios.”

David Andersen, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, figures “the chip’s massive parallelism gives us the ability to investigate, today, the degree of parallelism that will be needed from applications five years down the line to make the best use of emerging many-core platforms.”

The prototype, an x86 follow-on to the 80-core non-x86 Polaris chip Intel unveiled two years ago, was developed by Intel Labs in Bangalore, India, Braunschweig, Germany and Hillsboro, Oregon as part of the company’s Tera-scale Computing Research Program.

Intel says it will detail the widget’s 24 dual-core or tile architecture and circuits in a paper to be presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February.

Apparently the 1.3 billion-transistor concept chip, as Intel calls it, shares some attributes with Intel’s upcoming Larrabee GPU microarchitecture but not its cache-coherent design.

Tilera has a 100-core chip that it expects to put out next year.