[Beowulf] FTC and Intel

[Peter St. John]

Haakon,
And thanks for correcting me. I had been surprised your question went
unanswered so long as it did; I should always be suspicious that means I had
superficially misconstrued the question.
Peter

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Håkon Bugge <h-bugge at online.no> wrote:

> Peter,
>
> On Dec 19, 2009, at 22:20 , Peter St. John wrote:
>
> Haakon,
> What I saw (in a recent Slashdot, which I ought to be able to find) was the
> idea that an Intel compiler disables it's own highest levels of
> optimizations if it detects that the host processor is not Intel. The
> complaint is based on that I believe.
>
> FWIW, I imagine that if an automobile engine detected poor octane in the
> fuel, it might throttle down the maximum speed of the car; but if it did so
> after detecting a competitor's brand of gasoline, it could be considered
> anti-competitive. But of course IMNAL or however we announce we ain't
> lawyers so CGS (cum grano salis).
> Peter
>
>
> Intel's compiler generates code that will not run on AMD CPUs (i.e. non
> GenuineIntel) if an instruction-set higher than SSE2 is selected. This issue
> is covered by the referenced complaints elsewhere. I know this issue pretty
> well, as I wrote a piece of software used by Scali/Platform MPI which
> reverted the Intel compiler's check for GenuineIntel, which transparently
> allowed MPI programs to run on AMD CPUs with SSE3/SSSE3 instruction set
> enabled.
>
> Claim 20 in the complaints is not related to this, but _interoperability_
> between GPUs and Intel CPUs. That is what I tried to get a better
> understanding of. I have received insightful comments around this issue
> off-list.
>
>
> Thanks anyway, Håkon
>
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:33 AM, Håkon Bugge <h-bugge at online.no> wrote:
>
>> In http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9341/091216intelcmpt.pdf, there are
>> allegations against Intel, such as "20. Intel’s efforts to deny
>> interoperability between competitors’ (e.g., Nvidia, AMD, and Via)
>> GPUs and Intel’s newest CPUs".
>>
>> I was unaware of this. Anyone know what kind of interoperability we are
>> talking about here?
>>
>>
>> Håkon
>>
>>
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>
>
> Mvh.,
>
> Håkon Bugge
> h-bugge at online.no
> +47 924 84 514
>
>
>
>
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