AMD, Intel Legal Battle

[CoFree]

New Documents in AMD, Intel Legal Battle Shed More Light on Case
by: Shane McGlaun
AMD and Intel have filed in the area of 150 million pages in the legal battle so far

AMD filed a suit against Intel way back in 2005 alleging among other things that Intel had conspired with major PC OEMs to keep AMD out of the marketplace. The case is set to go to trial in 2009 and some new documents filed this month shed more light on AMD’s accusations against Intel.

EWeek reports that new documents submitted on May 1 by AMD include over 100 pages detailing the myriad of allegations AMD had against Intel. The document claims that Intel has used its market position with OEMs to dominate the market ever since IBM introduced the first personal computer using a version of the Intel 8086 processor.

Part of the allegations AMD has leveled against the chip giant is that Intel abused its dominant position in the market by offering deep discounts to OEMs and by punishing OEMS who considered using a second chipmaker.

In its defense, Intel filed a counterargument -- that is also over 100 pages -- where it claims that the chip market is competitive and that accusations from AMD are only an attempt to make up for years of producing inferior products.

In all somewhere between 150 million and 200 million pages of documents have been introduced by both AMD and Intel so far. The core allegation by AMD is that Intel used relationships with vendors like Dell, HP, IBM, Acer and Gateway to exclude AMD by offering the OEMs special treatment if they only bought Intel processors.

AMD cites an example of this practice in action when it claims Gateway suddenly phased out AMD in July of 1999 and cancelled the launch of a machine using the AMD Athlon Processor. The documents related to this action are heavily redacted to protect trade secrets and AMD alleges Intel has used the protection order to shield its practices from the public.

Intel spokesman Chuck Malloy said that the redactions are to protect Intel trade secrets and AMD is merely using the latest filing to drag more witnesses into the case. Naturally, Intel says that AMD has not been able to offer processors with the capabilities required by the top PC makers and its lack of market share is due to that fact alone.

[sadalius]

I know this article is a couple days old, but I had to comment. To say that AMD doesn't make a chip capable of satisfying the likes of Dell, Gateway, HP, Acer, blah blah blah is totally ludicrous. To think such a think means you don't know anything about processors. In most cases, AMD has produced chips that would stomp the guts out of Intel's chips. Anyone who has ever had a PC with an AMD chip knows this. Heck anyone that has any computer background knows that AMD got its start with a contract from Intel making chips for them (8086 and 8088). Thats how AMD came to be what we know it. It was in 1986 that Intel broke an agreement with AMD to produce Intel chips so AMD filled suit and the rest is history. The two companies has clashed throughout their existance though so I don't think this suit will be the end of their "not getting along".

[CoFree]

i agree with you on that man.
we build computer with both and cant tell a big difference ether way most of the time.
Also most of the time there is one big difference the price.Amd will be a good bit less for the same speed chip.

[sadalius]

Yep. What I actually should have said was in most cases AMD has produced chips that has stomped the guts out of Intels on the benchmarks. Like you said though, through normal use, you can hardly tell the difference in performance. Thats why I find it hard to believe that top PC makers would shun AMD's chips in favor of Intel's. Give consumers the choice. When I ordered my Dell, they had available the AMD X2 64's and thats what I took. My laptop has an Intel P4, or at least I think its a P4, and it does ok. The big thing is whether the software that your running on any given processor was written to take advantage of which ever chip your using.

[Jman 31]

Any way to tell if a program will take advantage of a particular chip?

[sadalius]

Not really. Most application devs write their apps to where it will run no matter what chip its running on. What that means is if the chip you have has some special features, like when intel introduced hyper threading, it wont be taken advantage of. Sometimes game devs will write patched for particular chips kinda like what WOW did for multi-core processors. Anyway, I think you get the idea.

[Sesshomaru]

Stuff like Photoshop really needs to take advantage of hyperthreading, it's such a resource hog and confound even quad cores. AMD is hurting right now, they lost $385 million in the first quarter this year. The Phenom has been smoked by the Q6600 in most all benches I've seen. The Phenom is a true quad core. In theory if more 64 bit applications made use of hyperthreading, AMD's Hyper Transport System may be able to win against Intel's older FSB speeds. Right now though, the Q6600 is the clear winner in terms of horsepower vs the Phenom, it is massively OCable with a decent mobo and RAM with a 9.0x multiplier.