Intel steals a march on AMD in graphics hardware war

Wired on Friday: So much of how computers work revolves around a conflicting tendency to openness and to secrecy. It's like the old Cold War, when no one was sure which side would win, and everyone concentrated on the smallest shifts in the stalemate.

In this war, the Iron Curtain occurs when a defiantly open operating system, Linux, meets the secretive world of graphics hardware. And when the troops on this border are microprocessor giants Intel and AMD, it's worth paying attention.

Here's the latest news from the front: AMD has decided to make inroads into the graphics market by buying one of the leading graphics hardware companies, ATI. That gives AMD far-better graphical know-how than Intel. But Intel has responded with tactical alignment you might not expect from the decades-old near-monopolist. It has sided with the forces of openness, a strategy which may belatedly win Intel the lion's share of the graphics chip market.

Graphics hardware - the chips that paint onscreen the text and images in desktop applications, movies and video games - must be efficient. To make them run fast, operating systems (OSs) need to co-operate with them. That said, you don't want the operating systems and hardware getting too friendly. A program like Windows has to be fairly aloof about what it runs with, because one day its owner may upgrade the graphics chip. Windows has to work as happily with this new chip as the old one.

The answer to this problem is a "driver". Think of this as a sort of demilitarised zone, where only certain communications can take place. Graphics card drivers take standard commands from the OS and quickly turn them into orders tailored for a particular chip.

You'll not see much in Windows about drivers unless you're installing hardware. But in Linux, they're often the Iron Curtain between friendly and enemy territory.

Linux is open source: it's designed to be completely open to anyone wishing to tinker with or improve it. But graphics chip companies, especially the market leaders nVidia and ATI, refuse to release drivers as open source - even when they are supposed to work with Linux. Instead, they give Linux-users mysterious "closed" drivers. They work, but neither the inventors of Linux nor its users know how.

If there's a bug in the mysterious driver, no one else can fix it. If the Linux developers want to change or improve something in their code, they either have to wait for the graphics card people to notice and update their driver, or stop Linux from working with the card and make users unhappy. Linux people wonder why they can't just fix it themselves.

The argument against open sourcing graphics drivers is not often explicitly made, but you can extrapolate it from the positions taken by graphics accelerator firms.

Graphics chips are driven by costly research and development. New developments are fiercely hidden from competitors who could adapt them for their own chips. Worse, they could even improve upon them or beat the originator to market. In those trade secrets lie the real value of a company. That's why AMD bought ATI for $5.4 billion (€4.2 billion): to gain technologies Intel lacks.

Opening the drivers that operate these chips wouldn't reveal all of these secrets, but could certainly supply hints. That's why ATI - and now AMD - keeps its drivers secret.

But that doesn't explain why Intel has decided to lean the other way. Intel has just announced that it's open sourcing even its most-advanced graphics technologies - and allowing Linux and any other open source OS to peruse and modify them for free.

Does Intel take a hit from revealing its 3D hardware's secrets? It's hard to imagine how. Graphics chips are not its core profit centre, and its graphics technology is not cutting edge.

If ATI chose to lift ideas from Intel, it must be in trouble.

Instead, Intel seizes real gains from open sourcing. Rather than competing on the power of their chips, they compete on flexibility. Manufacturers can tinker with Intel's free source code, which is a tempting alternative to a closed system.

The end result has been a publicity coup for Intel. AMD has always been the pet favourite of geeks. But now, in pursuit of exciting new technology, it risks looking secretive and inflexible.

Intel, long treated with suspicion because of its near-monopoly market position, looks generous by comparison. Whatever the advantages of open versus secrecy in graphics technology, it is propaganda that will win this war. And right now Intel is certainly winning that fight.