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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Here's the list of CPUs which incorporate the AVX2 instructions that enable some of these optimizations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions#CPU...

You could write your distro to check for flags that will tell it whether or not you have these using flags from /proc/cpuinfo. Or you could check whether it's in the Intel half of the list or the AMD half of the list. Or you could write your own distro that only runs on the first half of the list.

I get that Intel's contributions aren't purely altruistic. There are likely to be subtle tuning problems that require slight changes to optimize on different platforms, and they can't really be expected to do free work for AMD. But it looks to me like they're being unecessarily anticompetitive.

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>being unecessarily anticompetitive

Isn't setting up barriers to entry generally considered to be a part of healthy competition? I'd hazard to say that as long as a company is playing within the boundaries of what's allowed, there's nothing they could do that's anticompetitive; at the most, you could accuse them of being somewhat unsportsmanlike.

Competition is desirable because it aligns with society’s goals of innovation and progress which also imply increased productivity and lower prices.

Artificial barriers to entry are contrary to that and if they’re not illegal they should be.

Where do you define this line of barriers becoming 'artificial'?

It's artificial when the vendor expends additional time, effort, or funds to construct a barrier, or chooses an equally-priced non-interoperable design that a rational, informed consumer with a choice would reject. If you're expending great effort to write custom DRM or to reinvent open industry standards that you could have installed cheaply, that's artificial.

I fully admit that there are natural barriers that occur at times. I don't think that you should be expected to reverse-engineer your competitor's products and bend over backwards to make them work better.

Here, for a concrete example, Intel had a clear choice to test whether a processor supported a feature by checking a feature flag - It's in the name, they're literally implemented for that exact purpose - or they could expend extra effort in building their own feature flag database by checking manufacturer and part number. They could have either expended extra effort to launch and distribute their own entire custom Python distribution, or submitted pull requests to the existing main distribution. For another example, Apple could have used industry-standard Phillips or Torx screws in their hardware: Manufacturers had lines to produce them, distributors had inventory of the fasteners, users had tools to turn them. Instead, they went to great expense to build their own incompatible tri-lobe screws, requiring probably millions of dollars in investment in custom tooling and production lines, all for the sake of creating an artificial barrier.

We could start with something similar to the concept of Pareto optimality; Intel could have delivered their maximum performance without preventing optimizations from being applied equally on AMD hardware, but instead they choose to disadvantage AMD without providing anything extra on top of what they could do while remaining "neutral".

Isn't setting up barriers to entry generally considered to be a part of healthy competition?

No, it is not. This is better described as vendor lock-in, than a barrier to entry. But vendor lock-in is also against healthy competition.

Healthy competition means that users choose your product because it suits their needs the best, not because they are somehow forced to choose your product.

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