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by varelse 1660 days ago
That seems awfully esoteric to me. Compare and contrast with Intel taking Altera off the map and AMD taking Xilinx off the map. At the time, FPGAs were erroneously seen as a credible competitor to GPUs in artificial intelligence. They absolutely smash GPUs at extreme low latency, but it was a poor technological take to assume that meant they could beat them where GPUs were strong but that didn't stop lots of money being thrown at the attempt.

Which is to say it seems odd that the FTC would get its hackles up over a case as nichey as you describe. it would seem the elephant in the room is Nvidia's dominance of AI. There's nothing stopping AMD or Intel developing equivalent SoCs. In fact one of the cases you mentioned comes from Xilinx ergo AMD.

So I have to think this has to be something as basic as slinging mud at their dominance of AI. Something as simple as trying to exclude competing browsers from your operating system's desktop. Something as understandable as trying to exclude third parties from collecting money on your mobile platform. And since both other cases are larger more general instances of dominance, it's curious they aren't being investigated as well. Well not really, there's probably a lot of grift here.

But if we're going to worry about a single party having dominance of AI then we have to start asking questions about Google and Facebook controlling the major interfaces to AI. Sure, they are open source, you can fork them if you like. But they get to control all the pull requests into the master branch. That lets them control how well any one platform runs their framework. That seems a bit anti-competitive as well when at least one of the parties has their own AI hardware.