“Between slagging each other off with cartoons […] and taking each other to court over chipset licenses, there’s been no love lost between NVIDIA and Intel over the past few years – but it looks like the war is over. The two companies just announced a new six-year cross-licensing deal that will see Intel paying NVIDIA a total of $1.5b over the next five years for access to NVIDIA’s technology, while also giving NVIDIA a license to some of Intel’s patents. The two companies have also agreed to drop all pending litigation, because you know, they’re now friends who just exchanged a billion and half dollars.”
Intel patching things up with nVidia to make an offer in the future?
Edited 2011-01-10 23:07 UTC
If you want to buy another company, you don’t “give” them 1.5 billion of your money first. You make an offer when they are “weak” and you are “strong”. Compared to yesterday, Intel got 3 billion weaker compated to NVIDIA
Team Nvidia is getting stronger by the minute. Glad to see it, I’m a big fan of their work.
Meh, they still wont source their drivers. Makes them useless on most OSs. Not a good thing on a site about other OSs.
If you are using a fringe operating system, don’t expect the moon (i.e. full accelecerated 3d). There are open source nvidia drivers around, and the closed source ones work on all the important platforms.
Yes, but this is problematic. The “best” open source gfx drivers come from intel. However if they start using Nvidia IP it means that they can’t provide specs for their gpus and so we have a binary blob again.
I hope people don’t forget what a complete cock-up Poulsbo has been….
Edited 2011-01-11 10:21 UTC
I don’t think so. Intel broke their open source drivers a couple of years ago, and they haven’t fixed them since. Although nouveau is a decent attempt, they are working in the dark and they will forever fall further behind because of that.
The Radeon open source drivers, especially the Gallium3D ones that are starting to flesh out towards full functionality,
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
have also just started on the long process of optimising performance. These are the next-to-best open source graphics drivers. Since AMD/ATI graphics chipsets are a class above Intel graphics chipsets, these drivers are quite a way ahead of Intels.
However, the very best open source graphics drivers are surely the new open source drivers coming out of AMD/ATI directly.
AMD Already Has Open-Source Fusion Drivers
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODc5Mw
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODk5MQ
Edited 2011-01-11 13:08 UTC
The Intel graphic drivers are open source, and they have been broken for about 3 years under linux. As for myself, I would exchange an open source driver for a working one any day.
Edited 2011-01-11 08:19 UTC
Broken is a bit too far, but in this case intel would have to base its new binary blob upon the old driver or start from scratch. So you have a binary based upon a less than perfect driver or you wait until they make a new driver (remember it can’t use kms or drm at all).
So what manufacturer should one choose? I mean “which from AMD or Nvidia” as I don’t trust Intel for graphics chips. I’m looking for a high-end card that I can run under Linux with BOINC clients.
Another confirmation that having a monopolistic practices pays enough to cover any costs, in terms of antitrust fines (MS) or damages to existing competitors. So it makes sense in reality, even though economic theory says it is a really bad thing.
This agreement it´s a direct response to ARM and AMD.
ARM is kicking ass in the low power market. Seems like ATOM will not match ARM Cortex power/performance/price. Nvidia tegra chips will kill ATOM market.
AMD has Fusion on the market now. Sandy Bridge is not ready… Still Intel processors looks stronger but without a good Gpu they are only good for servers. And Nvidia just announced ARM chips for servers.
From the SW side, ARM runs any software in the Linux arena, iOS, Android and Chrome, and now, Windows will do as well.
Intel had no choice. It had to make up with Nvidia.
I believe that we have seats to the end of x86 ISA. At least to the end of the hegemony on the PC/Desktop market.
Considering Nouveau now have 2d/3d support under geforce 400/500 graphics drivers, I wouldn’t worry about getting access to the nvidia source code. Optimisations/performance increases are coming and development is proceeding at a fast pace. Once all the old cards are knocked off development will be able to shift into focusing on performance/features of shaders and the drivers will start to look good compared to the closed drivers.