EU Airs Out Intel's Dirty Laundry

[moomooman]

I've bought AMD and Intel over the years so I dont fanboy for either. I will however be boycotting Intel in future for the following reasons:

1. Anti competitive practices by Intel. Unfair.
2. Without competition from a little guy like AMD the pace of progress will be much reduced. Intel wants to puch AMD out and have a nice big monopoly.
3. Most importantly to me, Intel has involved itself in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty and is throwing millions of Euro into its effort to get it passed because it stands a better chance of getting the fines overturned under the Lisbon treaty. So a foreign multinational is interfering in a nations internal affairs, in that case they wont get any further money from me.

 

[falchard]

I still don't know why some of you are shocked. This was made public back in 2004 by AMD. AMD at that time simply had the better processors that they couldn't sell because of OEMs. It also explains why AMD's OEM network is much bigger and more loyal now then in the past.
I think the European Union just wants the money. The damage to Intel's reputation has already occured.

 

[dark_lord69]

I'm not surprised by this...
I generally buy AMD due to the much lower prices.

 

[warezme]

While I agree Intel's business practices are deplorable, I can't help but think AMD had some fault in its own downfall from what could have been higher market share. When they were on top with the fastest chips (Athlon X2's) and Intel was struggling with their heatburst..., er, netburst architecture, AMD had at least a year or two to further enhance its line up and keep pushing Intel. They did not do that. They sat on their asses and reaped the benefits of high dollar chips and Intel snuck under them and dropped the C2D bomb on them. They have been struggling now to simply do what they should have done in the first place.

 

[mitch074]

@warezme: AMD didn't have the funds, they had a product but no buyers, so no, they couldn't do anything: no funds for R&D, no funds to buy foundries, no funds to buy marketing, no funds to expand their portfolios... And still, they managed to keep themselves relevant through Ati's buyout, which finally allows them to offer complete solutions across the board (from small handsets to server farms, netbooks, mobile, ARM, x86 you name it), in markets where Intel can't use its monopoly to keep them out.

Note that Intel still tried: at the time Vista came out, the only IGPs that could run Aero were from Nvidia and AMD. They managed to force Microsoft into lowering Vista's requirements in order to sell Intel crap.

And Microsoft lost a class action suite because of that.

Want me to be blunt? When Intel sell overpriced, unsupported crap, they force sales through these OEM agreements; if something may cause their crap not to be sold, they f**k over their historical partners. When, after all that, they manage to sell not too bad technology (looking at i7, I don't see ANYTHING in it that AMD hadn't invented 8 years before - 8 years being an eternity in IT, and with funds like Intel got out of its shoddy deals, they sure could refine it for performance), they declare themselves saintly and white.

 

[waffle911]

Let's not forget, Intel's current lineup is so successful BECAUSE of AMD. They had to license AMD's X86-64 architecture because Intel couldn't make 64-bit work reliably or cheaply (remember Itanium?). The result? Core 2 Duo. And on-chip memory controllers, AMD's secret sauce that made their Athlons so far superior to the P4? Intel took them and made Nehalem. Intel had the R&D bucks (through lying, cheating, and pillaging, some might possibly say... extortion, whether it applies or not) to take AMD's research to the next level. AMD, being in a spot for cash, had little choice but to license Intel the 64-bit technology. If AMD hadn't done that, AMD would still have been just as screwed as they are now (Intel might have pulled AMD's x86 license), Core 2 Duo would have never come about and Core Duo would be the Intel norm. Whether that means that AMD would have soon stolen back the performance crown is debatable, though, since Intel had a market monopoly, OEMs likely wouldn't have pushed for 64-bit OS's because they couldn't get appropriate hardware support from their force-feeding supplier. Intel would have caught up without 64-bit tech, 64-bit likely wouldn't catch on in the consumer market for even another 4 years from now, and technology would be crawling at a snail's pace.
Even when technology wins,it still loses as long as Intel continues to play by it's own rules. I would never voluntarily build anything with Intel parts in it unless there were truly no other viable options. Which would be further evidence of anti-competitive practices on Intel's part.

I hope one day soon AMD can get its day in court and get the payback they deserve. Then they can take that money and use it in R&D so they can go back to wiping the floor with Intel like they did 5-8 years ago. I think back then, the OEMs should have just banded together to refuse Intel's shady deals. It was only their fear of each other that prevented them from doing that. If they all stood up together, though, they could have forced Intel into the spot in the corner it should rightly be sitting in.

 

[gomi]

Yeah this confirms the reasons why we never really saw many AMD based computers being sold from Dell and co. Now we know why.