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AMD Sues Intel for Antitrust
Kevin Krewell - Senior Editor
{07/18/2005}
The Hatfields and McCoys of Silicon Valley are at it again. Even with the mostly new management team at AMD and the recent changing of the guard at Intel, neither company can escape the past. AMD’s latest broadside was launched on June 27 with a 48-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware. AMD is claiming Intel violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act and Sections 4 and 16 of the Clayton Act. The complaint compares Intel’s x86 processor monopoly to previous monopolies by Standard Oil and Alcoa. Both AMD and Intel are incorporated in Delaware, and AMD said it chose the state because of its experienced court system for corporate litigation.
AMD is claiming a decade of anticompetitive behaviors and has listed in the complaint a litany of examples claiming that Intel engaged in unfair business practices. AMD claims that Intel has forced major customers into exclusive or near-exclusive deals: it has conditioned rebates, allowances, and market-development funding on customers’ agreement to severely limit or entirely forgo purchases from AMD. AMD claims Intel threatened or intimidated customers to keep them from introducing AMD computer platforms and to boycott AMD product launches and promotions. The complaint also encompasses retailers, claiming that Intel established and enforced quotas among key retailers, effectively requiring them to stock overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, Intel-powered computers, limiting consumer choice. Beyond customers and the channel, AMD claims that Intel excluded AMD from industry technical standards, which could have handicapped AMD from developing competitive products.
The compliant is loaded with colorful stories of supposed Intel intimidation and manipulation, with descriptions of computer executives being beaten (by Intel) into “guacamole” in retaliation and claims that Intel has resorted to old-fashioned threats, intimidation, and “knee-capping.” AMD will need to subpoena key computer manufacturer and channel executives to substantiate the allegations and produce any appropriate documentation. The only outcome we can guarantee is that this will be a long and expensive process.
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story (3 pages) here: www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2005/0718/192901.html. To find out more about Microprocessor Report, please visit: www.mdronline.com.
Powering Next-Gen Game Consoles
Kevin Krewell - Senior Editor
{07/18/2005}
At the most recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, the three major game-console manufacturers provided a tantalizing look at their next-generation products. All three have a level of commonality rare in this competitive business: all three are controlled by IBM Power processors and have graphics-display processors designed by either ATI or Nvidia. These three chip suppliers (ATI, IBM, and Nvidia) have locked up the next-generation console gaming business, leaving some of the companies that supplied the previous generation out of the new generation, specifically Intel and MIPS. For IBM, the console-business gains will reduce the sting of Apple’s recent rebuff, representing a potential market exceeding 100 million processors over the life of these products.
While ATI and Nvidia split the GPU designs (score: ATI 2, Nvidia 1), IBM got all the marbles with the CPUs. This was certainly a feather in IBM Microelectronics’ cap and has some practical benefits for the gaming community. The use of the Power architecture for all three platforms may help game developers by simplifying compiler development. The top largest competitors, Microsoft and Sony, got differentiated processors from IBM, but both processors use the same basic Power instruction set, and the PowerPC cores both vendors use also appear to be surprisingly similar. In an amazing coincidence, both processor designs were delivered at exactly the same frequency, 3.2GHz, negating any clock-frequency advantage for either vendor.
For ATI and Nvidia, these next-generation consoles extend the ongoing battle in PCs and Macs and carries on from some of the previous-generation consoles with Nintendo (ATI) and Xbox (Nvidia). This time, ATI gained the Xbox360 design from Nvidia, but Nvidia became Sony’s partner on the PlayStation 3 (PS3).
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story (4 pages, 3 graphics) here: www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2005/0718/192902.html. To find out more about Microprocessor Report, please visit: www.mdronline.com.
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