Intel has come to a preliminary antitrust settlement with the Federal Trade Commission's lawyers. It arrived there a few days ahead of a July 22 deadline, but there's no deal until it's approved by the agency's five commissioners and apparently it didn't look like they were going to say yea or nay by the 22nd so Intel has gotten a deadline extension until August 1.

The deadline puts the FTC's litigation against the company on hold.

Anyway, the deal would reportedly regulate the giant's use of discounts on both processors and graphics chips, but what that means exactly nobody is saying.

Considering the jeremiad-style nature of the FTC's Nvidia-inspired complaint accusing Intel of stifling competition, it could be quite earth-shaking.

The settlement would also reportedly extend to GPUs the competitive safeguards that AMD and Intel hammered out in settling AMD's private antitrust suit against the company late last year like not rewarding OEMs for buying only Intel chips or for reducing purchases from AMD or designing chips so they don't work well with AMD products.

There was never any risk of a fine, like in Europe where Intel had to pay a record $1.45 billion. The FTC doesn't have that authority.

If Intel finally gets the FTC off its case, it still has to deal with antitrust suit lodged by the attorney general of the state of New York. It pretty much regurgitates AMD's complaint that Intel paid AMD $1.25 billion to settle.