AMD lawyer cites critical 'incidents' in Intel rivalry
The Intel-Advanced Micro Devices rivalry spans decades. But in a phone interview last week, the top lawyer at AMD discussed critical moments when the competition with Intel got particularly nasty.
Tom McCoy, AMD's senior vice president of legal affairs, cited two critical junctures in the Intel-AMD rivalry when Intel turned up the heat and, he claims, violated the law.
Tom McCoy
(Credit: AMD)McCoy said the first major assault from Intel came in 1999, when AMD launched the Athlon architecture. "When we go back and we look at all the anecdotal incidents of Intel violating the law, they always center on when we're coming to market with our new-generation technologies," he claimed. "They did it when we came to market in 1999 with the Athlon."
It happened again in 2003, McCoy alleged. "And they did it big time when we came to market in 2003 with the Opteron processor for the server and the Athlon 64 processor," he said. "We had the integrated memory controller, the HyperTransport, we were focused on energy efficiency," McCoy said, referring to two key AMD processor technologies.
"And Intel was caught years behind. That's when they really got out of control," McCoy asserted.
In reference to the European Commission decision to fine Intel $1.45 billion he said: "We don't care about the fine. That's simply consumer harm. What's important to us is the injunction. The decision carries with it an immediate injunction. To stop doing things that are illegally foreclosing AMD technology from getting to the market," he said.
Intel had no specific comment. "We do not comment on our commercial relationships," Intel said in response, though a spokesperson offered this general statement: "What is reflected in AMD's claims reinforces what we have been saying all along. The market rewards customers that perform well and acts accordingly when they do not. If Intel technology did not perform well and our product road map was not strong, customers would go elsewhere."
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Make it a 2 horse race in the netbook market, AMD and INTEL Ban together to finally crush the weakling of VIA? the last time i had a VIA product was in 2003 as a IGP, (onboard video) , and thus split the remaining market share.
Just my 2 cents worth
BTW... I have several AMD boxes so im no INTEL fanboy.
P.S: The only reason Apple went with intel is because AMD didnt have the resources to deal with apple's my way or the highway way of doing business, frankly, if they had gone with AMD the ATI RADEON HD 3200 onboard graphics would have made a better choice than the INTEL Garbage cards, i have played several newer games on that IGP. Secondly, While the Phenom and the TURION families arent as powerful as the INTEL cpus it would have been cheaper to buy for apple, Hint hint, maybe a cheaper apple?
This entire fight predates the Core 2 and Phenom chipsets. What you, and a lot of people seem to miss, is that this is not reffering to NOW (this case started a decade ago). What is happening now is irrelevent, and any technology that was released after the case started has little impact on what happened then.
As for Netbooks-- I actually really like Netbooks, but they are a race to the bottom that I think AMD is smart to avoid. Not only does Intel have a strong base in it, but the ARM manufacturers are going to start impinging on that area and even if Intel staves them off, could very well be a pyrrich victory as AMD/Intel see some of their profits eroded by a platform that cannibalizes sales of their profitable lines.
AMD had the performance and energy efficiency crown from 1999 to 2006, and yet they couldn't sell their processors because Intel used monopolistic practices, selling OEMs processor only for $200 while selling the entire cpu + chipset for $90 if they can guarantee to not sell AMD stuff. How the heck is that fair for competition even if AMD is the king?
Had AMD been able to get fair market introductions, AMD would have way more money, spend more money on R&D, and probably still be the performance king.
The current Intel Core i7 is pretty much Intel designed by AMD.
So you're whining, "they didn't play fair!" when Intel set up some exclusive dealer contracts? Um, hello? That's done ALL THE TIME in normal American business. what do you think AT&T did with the iPhone?
Often, suppliers like Intel have to work with their client to meet specific needs, not just selling generic parts to anyone to be use in any way. That time investment, and the relationship, and streamlining the supply delivery are all part of the necessary relationship between the supplier and their client. To clinch the deal with a exclusivity contract for x-amount of time shouldn't surprise anyone.
I'm not surprised the EC with its socialist tendencies would take a line like this. I am disappointed that there are so many idiots out there in the US that whine about "unfair competition."
I agree, exclusive dealer contracts happen all the time. They're so awesome because i hate having too many options when I want to be ripped off.
But you've overlooked the entire point of the arguement (conveniently). The problem is monopolistic practices and market influence. AT&T and the iPhone dont have enough market influence to styfle competition in the market and therefore are acceptable business alliances. However companies like Microsoft and Intel have so much market influence that they can force competition out of the market if they're not kept in check.
Lets make an example. Let say that Microsoft notifies Dell that they will increase the price of an OEM license 3 times over, if they continue to offer Linux solutions. Here Dell would make the business decision of weighing profit of Linux sales against lost revenue to Microsoft pricing. Because Linux makes such an insiginficant part of the market, Dell would stop selling Linux.
The same would apply to any OEM that was given this ultimatim by Intel in regards to AMD. Because so much of the market is reliant on Intel, they can easily influence (and have) OEM distributers and damage AMD's sales.
Now you can **** and moan about socialist this and whiny that, but the fact is that even in Capitalism, monopolistic practices are a caveat and must be checked or the market damage can be significant. This entire article is case and point.
Last I checked, the EC's morality meter was far below the standards of reason. How can you whine about a rival american company operating in "unfair competition" when AMD gets direct funding from the German gov't? Such such charges sounds far to much like *Directive 10-289* to have any sort of credibility. Maybe if writers would actually cover the story by giving details, us readers could decide for ourselves. But then, that would be too objective of a motive for most of today's journalists, wouldn't it?
I am sick of companies trying to dictate us what we want and i am fine with fine intel got (though its comming to late and intell already make bilions on it from my opinion).
Its allways about either of tho things or both at once, getting money and/or gaininging market share.
If its your company seling 10% of all PCs and servers worldwide and intel "give you offer" as it did before because you are small and refusing it can hurt or even kill your company as your oponents will welcome to have advantage over you.
If you sell 60% of all PCs and servers or you are bigger and stronger company as IBM then you have choice and intel never tryed on IBM what he did on smaler companies because he know it could break it neck, but he was more then happy make "offer that cannot be refused" to many companies having significant but not dominant marketshare.
Sort of like how Steve Ballmer did it when Vista was losing its lunch money to the competition (and even to XP)... a lot of whining, but no specificity or action.
The sad part is, AMD actually had an edge for years with the Opteron, back when Intel was floundering in the craptastic NetBurst architecture, stuck selling Pentium EE-series and (heh) Itanium chips. AMD never took advantage of that. Once Intel finally got its **** together, AMD got blindsided... and now when it's their turn to innovate, they come up empty.
...their FUD-fest about alleged lawbreaking is pretty hollow in the face of that.
Second point to make here is that AMD did not need to file charges the charges were on behalf of the consumer in the EU. If you don't agree with the laws fine you can have your opinions but the police catch you with and ounce of weed the legal system will charge you the same whether or not you believe pot should be legal. Disagreement with the law does not change the law, appeal to higher courts does which is Intel's right which they are presuming. As for AMD posting their own charges they are doing such in the states (Delaware I think) and are just waiting for their day in court.
Lastly the federal government of the united states are also going to be filing charges similar to the EU's. In America under our laws, only reason we are slow to the gun is due to lax anti trust legislation from the previous administration. Intel "allegedly"(innocence before proof) broke laws about anti competitive behaviors for the last 8 years but were not officially brought up on the charges due to filibusters and like that one can expect from other such masters of the legal craft(big tobacco the NRA Etc.)
in summery the law stands from country to country not from nationality to nationality. french guy kills someone in Italy they get tried and jailed in Italy. Laws exist as guidelines and if deemed unfair or not applicable can be changed in a court of appeals. You break the law you only have to options, Take your punishment or change the laws. what holds for one holds for all or the system collapses.
"intel blocked them out of the market with very shady deals waited for their reverse engineering team to match amd's new advances then apply the Millions of dollars of research and development that their ill got gains could bare."
This is where I disagree. In 2003, HT wasn't any sort of a deciding factor (as evidenced by the fact that the NetBurst-based Pentium 4/Xeon series had that, but got approximately nowhere with it). Opterons were outselling Xeons in the server room by wide margins during that time, and were doing just as well in gaming rigs and high-end consumer machinery. The Core series didn't come out until ~2006/7 or so... years after the period he's referring to. Until the Core series came out, Intel was floundering, and it showed.
"Second point to make here is that AMD did not need to file charges the charges were on behalf of the consumer in the EU."
...I'm very sure that AMD wasn't sitting idly by when those complaints were filed. ;)
Thing is, it is one thing to make accusations in conjunction with a lawsuit filing. It is another entirely to make accusations but back it up with approximately nothing.
Meanwhile, AMD is still circling the bowl - first they follow-up the Opteron with substandard products, then they sell their fabs, then a metric ton of complaining and sniping... but there's still one thing missing: Innovation. They used to have it, and I think they are still capable, but for some odd reason they can't seem to pull it off.
By the by, you may want to learn the distinctions between civil torts/law and criminal law, since your analogies do not work at all in this case. Civil law works far differently than criminal law, both in the US and in the EU.
So if you wanted opteron server you could get it from small companies, but thats not place where big bussines getting their servers from.
- by cloudmatt May 26, 2009 12:03 PM PDT
- Your right I'm no lawyer and the finer points to legal standings are possibly beyond me. I'm sure AMD was a little bird on the EU's shoulder. I'll even give you that AMD's latest and greatest aren't exactly jaw droppers. None the less no matter how corrupt or just you feel the EU is, a billion plus fine can't be pinned on rainbows and unicorn farts. Intel had to have crossed or at least stepped on the line and must answer for it. I actually agree the EU's fine(as it goes to the EU) probably won't fix the imbalance and at most bring Intel back to the just this side of legal standards of practice. While AMD was holding the edge of the game they still hardly had a comparable market share even with the superior product. Any store you go to will have five Intel based machines to one AMD even back then(assumeing the company even offered an AMD alternative). As AMD stands now they have a very well priced product with more than enough power for any application(AMD as seen in Supercomputers) so I would hardly say circling the bowl and or substandard. AMD Vs. Intel is like saying Coke or Pepsi I doubt I will convert the Intel masses and I'm sure you're aware AMD fans will tend to say true as well. During this news story about Intel getting caught with it's hand in the cookie jar all the fan boy's have come out and I just can't stand hearing every one taking this black or white attitude. The courts(EU) will get this straightened out eventually good ole uncle Sam will get is wacks in as well. time will even shed light on AMD's direct case with Intel. I think AMD has a valid claim, that Intel may have crossed lines and the consumer got stuck holding the bill. I also highly doubt Intel will have to shell out in full or possibly at all, AMD will grab an extra 10% market share or that fanboys a like will join hands across the globe and sing in harmony. I just would like to see an Intel fan give a nod that there is a chance that an 80%+ market share can't be held by innovation alone.
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