Monopolistic overtones?
"It's difficult to say if this is illegal," McGregor told us when we asked whether Intel's actions held a whiff of monopoly to them.
"If Intel develops the technology, should they be allowed to have an advantage in the market? I would say yes, but is this good for the market? Absolutely not!" continued McGregor.
"I would say sometime during Craig Barrett's tenure, Intel forgot that enabling the market was what made Intel the industry leader and drove the growth of the computing market, because they started holding back technology or making it proprietary, which often lead to the demise of the proposed technology," said McGregor, perhaps rather ironically considering Nvidia's stand on PhysX lately.
McGregor also argued that there had been several periods where Intel had difficulties with its chipsets, due to choosing the wrong memory technology or other technical problems. "At those points in time, having third-party chipsets were critical to both Intel and the industry," he said.
Integrated CPU killed the chipset store
Intel's move to integrate graphics and memory controllers onto the CPU, however, basically eliminates the opportunity for a separate north bridge that includes a GPU and memory controller, so, as Peddie put it "the whole thing becomes moot."
"By the time the courts hear the case it will be too late and CPUs with embedded graphics will be entering the market," said Peddie, explaining that he thinks the IGP business is a dead-end market. "The IGP business is going away and Intel has blocked Nvidia from participating in the last generation of CPUs that could have used one, and AMD has its own solution," he said. Brookwood agreed, noting: "the issues Nvidia faces in this segment have more to do with Moore's law than contract law."