Skype Adds Intel Only Features

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Far be it for me to have a go at Skype (it has kept me in contact with the people I love all over the world), but wait a cotton pickin’ minute…

The performance of chips can fall where they may but when a company deliberately builds features into its software that can only be accessed by one brand of CPUs I’m going to scream ‘”Foul!”.

So a big red card to Skype for buddying up with Intel in the locker rooms and agreeing to build features into the next build of its uber-successful VoIP programme that can only be accessed by owners of Centrino Duo and Pentium D processors. Ten-way conference calling will be the first of the exclusive services, closely followed by exclusive enhanced video calling.

Now as our, and virtually any other reviews you can find across the web will show, to date Intel dual core processors have been far from competitive with AMD’s Athlon X2 range. Consequently, the informed consumer has regularly been choosing the latter. Clearly with this move, however, Skype is saying it doesn’t want you to have the freedom to choose a processor based solely on its merits. It wants to help shoehorn you into buying from only one brand, regardless of quality. How low is this kind of behaviour? Well, industry punch bag Microsoft has been accused (and found guilty) of many things, but you won’t see Vista released this winter with half its features blocked to owners of either AMD or Intel CPUs…

So whatever heavy drinking session Niklas Zennström and Paul Otellini found themselves embroiled in late one night, can they please sober up, takes their hangovers like men, admit the agreement they presumably drew on one another with lipstick is something very silly indeed and grow the hell up?

After all, you don’t see TrustedReviews restricting the end of its articles just because you are running hardware in your computer made b…

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