Report: EU ombudsman criticizes Intel antitrust regulators
The European Union's ombudsman has criticized the antitrust regulator in a recent case against Intel, saying the regulator did not include evidence that was potentially exculpatory for the chipmaker, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
In May, Intel was fined 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion) for engaging in, according to the Commission, illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market for computer chips based on the x86 architecture--the design that both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices use in their microprocessors.
"Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years," competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement at the time.
The investigation was driven by complaints from rival AMD.
The ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, chided the Commission for "maladministration" by not formally citing an August 2006 meeting between Commission investigators and a senior Dell executive, according to the Friday report in the Journal. The Dell executive was providing evidence in the case and "is believed to have told investigators that Dell viewed the performance of Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as 'very poor,'" according to the report.
The Journal report concludes that this "could imply that Dell chose Intel chips for technical reasons, rather than because it was muscled into doing so." This would contradict the formal EU decision that claimed that PC manufacturers bought chips from Intel strictly because they did not want to forfeit hefty rebates from Intel.
The ombudsman cannot change the outcome of the case, according to the report.
Intel did not comment.
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. 
And, read this. http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3617
you get what you pay for...
Nowadays Intel has straighten up, progressively introducing first the Core, then the Core 2 and finally (after much effort) the i7 and Atom.
Competition works, but in this case it was forced by AMD's successful AMD64 strategy.
Further, what's bothersome here is that the EU commission members appear to have lied in order to conceal Dell exec's testimony from Intel. I.e., when Intel asked for a copy of the interview, the commission told Intel that the commission "did not interview" the Dell executive during the meeting, according to WSJ.
Note that at the time of the testimony (August 2006) Intel was already shipping Core 2 Duo chips which many would agree to be superior than AMD's counterparts in the consumer market. The fact that Dell had a server-line based on Opterons actually hurts AMD's case, since it shows that Dell was willing to carry AMD chips when the circumstances warranted them.
If someone says they will give 1mil of a product by next month but give you half of it but 3 months late, and it doesn't perform like originally stated. That is poor performance.
It screws with your bottom line and you lose customers forever. That is the technical reason for choosing one business partner over another.
Whether you can play Crysis better with one or the other matters to you. Whether they get their parts in time for the holiday shopping season matters to Dell.
Was _coming_ out. Statement had been said years after the alleged affair. What relevance did it have by that time?!?
Don't forget - Athlons were as good as P4s (and cheaper) for several years (until C2D), yet Dell did not use them at all...
AMD is slow and get hot quickly.
I'm not going to buy AMD chips anymore.
The Phenom II currently holds the world record for highest overclocked chip.
even putting the non stock chip cooler in the cost I paid less then the comparable Intel dual core as well
That's it load of bull. I mean of course from POV of business. The simple point is that Intel can't cover all price niches - some niches are maintained solely by AMD.
Yes, AMD CPU's performance can be viewed as "very poor", yet it is irrelevant. Price/performance ratio - what puts system into particular niche - is only what relevant.
The EU is trying to fix their economy by "billing" all these big companies with lots of money (Dell, MS, etc).
All those companies should pull out of the EU and given them the proverbial finger. The EU is nothing but a bunch of thugs.
Sadly that's also in style here now...Poland, Russia, and the other ex-Soviets have discovered the wonders of freeing people from omnipotent government, meanwhile we run full speed towards Old Europe Socialism.
Chip makers must be somewhere on the list for government seizure though right? Banks, autos, medicine...computers next? Then we won't have to worry about pesky things like "competition", "innovation", and "free markets".
After all, the treaties between the EU and the USA eliminate punitive tariffs in most cases, but the "court" can just put those suckers right back in. Most tariffs are created to protect the home grown product from competition from abroad, especially if that competition will destroy it on price and/or quality. So the EU is using the courts to say "no foreign company can be so big that they can dominate without paying us extra money in the process" which is basically the same concept as a tariff in another form.
- by mupptasstic August 11, 2009 11:15 AM PDT
- It's not irrelevent in this case. And given the small amount of price difference, for much better performance, would still yield Intel chips being better.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(22 Comments)The EU is trying to fix their economy by "billing" all these big companies with lots of money (Dell, MS, etc)."
The EU has fined 10 times the amount of EU companies, the they have of US/Asian or any others, you just hear about the US ones, BTW, the amout of money "billed" from ll those companies is a pee in a bucket compared to the size of Europes economy, about 14-15 Trillion dollars, yeah a billions going to keep that chugging, we loose that down the back of the sofa during the Day.