Agner`s CPU blog

I'm surprised that no anti-trust authorities have slammed Intel for this, as to me it is clearly anti competitiveness coding.
It's amazing how a company that has a virtual CPU monopoly for desktop computers, can get away with using the worst possible solution for determining the use of the best instruction set, where they are even willing to partly cripple their own new CPU's, like in the example of renaming a Core CPU to Pentium 4, because they refuse to use blacklisting or proper feature set detection regardless of the CPU brand or model.

There should be no reason at all to attempt to detect the CPU's brand other then to hurt the competition, even if this needs to be done to exclude bugged CPU models, any branching done that automatically eliminates non-Intel CPU's from a faster code path before checking if you are dealing with a bugged CPU or it's feature set, clearly is done on purpose.

If Intel was some small business, that was struggling for market share, then I would not care too much, but they are a monopolist who produces current products that are more expensive for the same speed as what I paid for my Phenom II CPU five years ago, because there is almost no competition, also hurting the people who buy Intel CPU's as Intel can jack up the price.

While Microsoft was forced by the EU to include competitors browsers as a choice in to it's OS, Intel is allowed to purposefully code compilers that are widely used due to their great optimization, to slowdown competitors products, it's just amazing.