The reinvestigation of the FTC (U.S. Commission regulating trade and commerce) on Intel's practices will force him to withdraw the function of its compiler, which hampers the program if not running on an Intel processor.

A dishonest advantage by FTC

If the function has long been known, many programmers are unaware of its existence and the FTC believes it is an anticompetitive practice. If Intel has promised not to hamper AMD models ("Intel resolves its lawsuit against AMD amicably"), he said nothing about the VIA chips. Nevertheless, U.S. officials came to address by requesting that Intel provides a new version of its compiler without CPU dispatcher that the FTC considers defective.

Dispatcher CPU that supports Intel too

Intel says its compiler so that the CPU dispatcher, the process will launch a code based processor running the program will promote the CPU of the firm. Typically used for chips that take advantage of games instructions (SSE2 or SSE3, for example), when the CPU dispatcher detects an Intel processor manufactured by a third brand (it has no value "Genuine Intel") it ensures that the less optimized version of the code is that which will be executed.

Specifically, has shown that changing the value VIA Nano Genuine Intel can increase the performance of the order of 47.4% and only 10% when the compiler thinks it is of AMD processor. The tests were performed in PCMark 2005.

Those who were aware could already install a patch available on the Internet, but through the intervention of the FTC, it should be ancient history.