Intel Gets Start of Antitrust Backlash from OEMs

[enigma067]

Intel Gets Start of Antitrust Backlash from OEMs

By Erik Sherman | Jan 4, 2010

A recent announcement that Lenovo would use CPUs from AMD (AMD) in a couple of its ThinkPads rather than chips from Intel (INTC) is the beginning of the price the chip giant could end up paying for its alleged anticompetitive activities: OEM customers shifting their orders.

In two separate statements, Lenovo said that it would use AMD chips in the ThinkPad X1003e ultraportable as well as the 13-inch ThinkPad Edge series, which is aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses. This is the first time that the ThinkPad brand, originally owned by IBM, will have used non-Intel chips:

An ultraportable PC positioned between a notebook and a netbook, the ThinkPad X100e can be equipped with AMD’s Athlon Neo single-core and dual-core, as well as the Turion dual-core processors. The ThinkPad Edge model, the smallest of three offerings in this product family and targeted at small and midsize businesses, may be paired with dual-core AMD Turion and Athlon Neo processors. The 14-inch and 15-inch ThinkPad Edge versions will still be powered by Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips.

Before you say, “But those are the small systems,” remember that the smallest systems, like netbooks, are the ones whose sales are really growing. To put it differently, AMD may not be in the prestige machines, but they’re going into the ones that may get the greater volume sales.

Starting in mid-November, I began noting that the upshot of all the antitrust activity focused on Intel would be customer defections:

PC vendors get completely wary of being sucked into the investigatory void and start shifting a significant portion of their purchasing to AMD. Forget fines and forget legal fees. That’s going to be the real price tag for years of allegedly using money and influence to keep a competitor constrained, and it will be a number with a whole lot of zeros.

I think the Lenovo switch is the first sign of that real price tag. Who knows how large a card it will need to be to record all the potential long-term loss for short-term gain?

Image via stock.xchng user MeHere, site standard license.

http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10004584/intel-gets-start-of-antitrust-backlash-from-oems/

 

[Guest]

I mean seriously if AMD had plans on ditching the remaining 35%, why wait? Why continue to pay Fab R&D running into the billions every year when they could take a huge chunk of change and be free of it?

 

[Chad Boga]

I mean seriously if AMD had plans on ditching the remaining 35%, why wait? Why continue to pay Fab R&D running into the billions every year when they could take a huge chunk of change and be free of it?

For starters the possibility of the sell only happened with the new agreement that Intel and AMD settled on recently.

Maybe GF don't want them to sell it all yet, but they are likely going to need a lot more operational cash in the next two years, so if they don't sell the lot, maybe they will just reduce their equity with GF in exchange for more cash.

Remember AMD started off with more than a 35% stake, but needed to trade equity for cash.

Even if Bulldozer is a hit, it will still take a good 2 QTRs after release to be giving AMD some good cashflow.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Lets say, AMDs contributions at 35% is higher than what they did in the past puts the overall reinvestment at 3= times what it was, due to ATICs investments, and if as you proposed, a family owned 35% of the restruant they ate at, and the old restraunt they some times ate at (gpus), they no went to the one they owned, if that restruant did a lot of business, yes, it not only may be cheaper to go there, but profitable as well.
In order to run a fab, you need ddep pockets, and is where some fabs have leveled off, and turned to existing older process, and innovation wasnt within their monetary reach, thus using old nodes for profit/business.
Enter deep pockets plus a current company and gabs, this problem is not only solved, but presents a serious problem for those old fabs first, and later the few that still have their fabs for production exclusively, as the new fab owners overtake more and more new fab work, as the older singly owned fab only fabs use more and more of old process only, with not enough new generated income for R&D, or TSMC, and possibly, Intel down the road, unless they use their fabs for outsourcing as well down the road, tho, some only see the one direction

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Id add, that 35% equity of GF is now more than what the 65% was worth. So, having only 35% of the responsibilities of the R&D, not having to pay 600 million a year for licensing, having fresh opportunities in a freer market with better product and better name recognition with OEMs no longer prohibiting them from sales, a overall stronger economic scenario accounting and including ATI contributions overall, thats a billion plus a year in black monies alone, so what they already used to do, having only 35% of what theyre responsible in the future to do, I think its very very posible, even better than before, especially if GF starts turning profits to AMD, besides the lowered costs of ATI which they already were paying to TSMC

 

[verndewd]

The original agreement was that AMD was to be 50/50 with GF. That changed towards the end of the closing of the agreement it was around 30% which is why intel brought up the x86 license and the fact that that could lead to breaking the agreement. But that was recently dissolved with the settlement and cross license agreement Intel and AMD reached recently.

Thats why i think that the GF will focus on profits for themselves first considering that the majority owner is the same UAE investor that pumped AMD with $700 million and as well Citi with $7 Billion.

Wish I had that much cash to throw around.

And BTW, I don't do drugs so



Hah. Says the guy who is following the word of the Goverments of the world although they are all corrupt and bought by corporations.

Hell the fact that they do anything with antitrust is hilarious since they themselves have been bought out by the very corporations they are trying to bring the hammer down on. But I guess they do it to reline their pockets with more money since they waste the "bribe" money on a new mansion.

if hot air was a drug id have gone space born years ago , broham :lol: :lol:

 

[jimmysmitty]

Considering how much AMD has already put into Globalfoundries, and considering how much Dresden and Fab 2 is worth, ATIC would need to shell out a forture for that remaining 35%, a lot more than AMD's remaining debt.

The same people who are funding the other 65% and giving the funding to do the other FABs and put $600 million into AMD also put near $7BILLION into Citi right before this. They are investors from the UAE. They have deep oil pockets. Don't under estimate their ability to bring funds into the picture.

Dresden and FAB 2 are not worth as much as you think. Intels newest FAB alone is probably worth more than both of those together due to its newest of the new tech and green abilities.

if hot air was a drug id have gone space born years ago , broham :lol: :lol:

lol.

 

[amdfangirl]

Soon America won't be the superpower with all the outsourcing.

That's where the nukes come in.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Funny, I was hearing theyd be dropping this investment, as itd be seen as too costly, now whered i hear that?

 

[sighQ2]

The same people who are funding the other 65% and giving the funding to do the other FABs and put $600 million into AMD also put near $7BILLION into Citi right before this. They are investors from the UAE. They have deep oil pockets. Don't under estimate their ability to bring funds into the picture.

Dresden and FAB 2 are not worth as much as you think. Intels newest FAB alone is probably worth more than both of those together due to its newest of the new tech and green abilities.

Well,
This whole game has now changed.
And I don't know what it means.
The picture is now very different.


Jan 13, 2010

GlobalFoundries Integrates Chartered


GF now owns 11 fabs. They bought Chartered; and now that deal is a done deal. It's all different now. And I don't know how it works because this is GF doing it's own thing.

New York will now be known as "Fab 8".


http://www.semiconductor.net/article/444020-GlobalFoundries_Integrates_Chartered.php

 

[jimmysmitty]

^

GF is buying up FABs to be able to offer competition to TSMC who might want to worry because AMD will put ATI over to GF since it will probably be less costly than TSMC.

But having 11 FABs by no means gives AMD 11 FABs. It just means that GF will be a pretty strong setup and might want to be careful of pushing out any competition in that area.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

And when profits come rolling in, as Im sure cross clientele will happen at some point, AMD makes money

 

[sighQ2]

I STARTED NEW THREAD ON THIS TOPIC.

"GlobalFoundries Acquires Chartered"

jimmysmitty
if you like you could post (copy) this comment there
or whatever you want to do


edit
you too jdj

 

[amdfangirl]

lol why?

 

[fazers_on_stun]

AMD laptops are absolutely fine for what laptops are, in fact the igp alone makes them better than intel cpu + intel igp.

The problem was AMD haven't really tried to put that point across until Vision launched. Mark my words, AMD have made inroads into intel's notebook market share this quarter, not through any great tech advance but simply through trying.

LOL - well I think that great guru over on UAEZone, Scientia, would disagree with you. He used to blog about how AMD was gonna turn mobile around with their latest & greatest efforts. IIRC AMD has had at least 2 prior mobile marketing efforts to try and compete against Intel's Centrino, and both were abysmal failures.

 

[amdfangirl]

You mean the AMD platform logo with the funny V shaped logos?

And the funny shiny colours?

I liked those logos.

Might explain why I ended up with a Turion 64 for my mum.

Or maybe I'm just on drugs.

Take your pick.

 

[roofus]

AMD laptops are fine. My only gripe with mine is the piss poor battery life which defeats the purpose of having a laptop to begin with. Still love it but hate having to put it on life support 1.5 hours into using it.

 

[theholylancer]

if someone made a simplified progression picture of this thread it would be interesting lol

how did we get from backlash to funny V logos?? every time it seems that when there are more than 5 ppl with titles other than the starting ones posting in it we get off track by page 2 and by page 3 or 4 it goes warping out of where it started

not that its not fun tho

 

[Guest]

LOL - well I think that great guru over on UAEZone, Scientia, would disagree with you. He used to blog about how AMD was gonna turn mobile around with their latest & greatest efforts. IIRC AMD has had at least 2 prior mobile marketing efforts to try and compete against Intel's Centrino, and both were abysmal failures.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100113PD220.html

I reckon AMD have already gained 1-2% share in notebooks in last quarter alone. We'll see soon enough.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

You mean the AMD platform logo with the funny V shaped logos?

And the funny shiny colours?

I liked those logos.

Might explain why I ended up with a Turion 64 for my mum.

Or maybe I'm just on drugs.

Take your pick.

No, I meant Puma and whatever AMD had before that (not Bobcat, although IIRC it was cat-related). Anyway, whatever it was, it wasn't quite the cat's meow..

Aren't you a bit young to be on drugs - or alcohol - already??? 😛

 

[fazers_on_stun]

AMD laptops are fine. My only gripe with mine is the piss poor battery life which defeats the purpose of having a laptop to begin with. Still love it but hate having to put it on life support 1.5 hours into using it.

For that matter Alienware and IIRC their parent company Dell, as well as others, offer a down-clocked i7 Nehalem stuffed into a laptop which similarly gets < 2 hours battery life. Unless you hook up a Sears Diehard battery 😛.

 

[Guest]

No, I meant Puma and whatever AMD had before that (not Bobcat, although IIRC it was cat-related). Anyway, whatever it was, it wasn't quite the cat's meow..

Aren't you a bit young to be on drugs - or alcohol - already??? 😛

Those were just platform names.

The point I'm trying to make is, AMD didn't even attempt to make inroads into the notebook market. You have to realise that when you have intel putting spanners in everything you do, some things have to give. For the past 3-4 years, it's been notebooks.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100113PD220.html

I reckon AMD have already gained 1-2% share in notebooks in last quarter alone. We'll see soon enough.

Possible I guess, since "thin is in". However AMD was noticeably MIA during CES, whereas Intel was banging away on all cylinders :

CES 2010: Arrandale Arrives

Tired of 15" (and often larger) gaming notebooks? How about trying this on for size: Alienware is coming out with the M11x, an 11.6" laptop that provides reasonable gaming performance. Details on the internal components are a bit light at present, but we're told it can last over 6 hours with the discrete GeForce GT335M switched off (or around two hours with the dGPU enabled). We love switchable graphics!

Of course, you're probably wondering what the GT335M provides, and we asked NVIDIA for details. The GT335M is built on a 40nm process with DX10.1 support. It has 72 SPs and provides up to 233 GFLOPS of performance. The core clock is 450MHz with 1080MHz shader clocks and up to 1GB of 1066MHz GDDR3 on a 128-bit bus (34GB/s of bandwidth). That puts shader performance right around the same level as the 9800M GS, but with 33% less memory bandwidth. As for the CPU, we're also trying to find out more, but we suspect it will use some form of Arrandale (Core i3/i5). We'll update if we can get an answer on the CPU options.

Dell also announced a ton of new Inspiron laptops with Arrandale CPUs. Again, specifics are light right now, but we know there will be new Inspiron 14 (14.0"), Inspiron 15 (15.6"), and Inspiron 17 (17.3") models with Arrandale CPUs, and at present it looks like all of the Inspiron line will use the new Intel HD Arrandale IGP. Battery life with the optional 9-cell battery is targeting 7+ hours, which is also nice to see, though that will drop to around 4 hours with the standard 6-cell battery. Availability is set for later this month, with prices starting at just $570 with Core i3. The Core i5 models bump the cost up significantly, starting at $850.

We're still waiting to test an Adamo XPS, though it's pretty easy to tell what Adamo and Adamo XPS offer. These are CULV platforms with an increased focus on design elements. They also come with SSDs in place of conventional HDDs, either 128GB or 256GB, depending on the model. With prices starting at $1500 for the standard Adamo and $2000 for the Adamo XPS, you really need to like the design. All of the Adamo laptops are already shipping.

Like Dell, HP is a huge OEM and has a ton of new products to announce, among them Arrandale and Pineview laptops, netbooks, and notebooks. This is a mobility focused article, so we'll stick to those areas and leave desktops, displays, printers, and other devices for another time. So far, HP's CES laptop announcements have focused on netbooks and business laptops, though looking at their web site shows some new consumer laptops as well....

 

[fazers_on_stun]

Those were just platform names.

The point I'm trying to make is, AMD didn't even attempt to make inroads into the notebook market. You have to realise that when you have intel putting spanners in everything you do, some things have to give. For the past 3-4 years, it's been notebooks.

They were promotional names when AMD was trying to catch up to Centrino, to no avail.

Ever since prices came down to $1K or less, mobile has been growing much faster than desktop, so much that even AMD finally noticed I guess. And of course they now want to contend in the netbook arena as well. However by the time they get product on the market, netbooks will have started to decline since notebooks are getting smaller & more efficient and PDAs larger and more capable.

AMD really needs to get more proactive instead of reactive - why is it Intel can catch most trends early (or start trends like with netbooks), whereas AMD catches the tail end or misses it entirely? They have access to the same market research tools, don't they?

 

[Guest]

AMD has had too much going for it last quarter to fail tbh.

Windows 7 was a free meal ticket for gpu's and AMD are basically sticking 'Windows 7' and 'Vision' on everything they sell now.

One of the magazines I read is PC Format and the first advert in it - double page - was full of Dx11 Gaming Systems.

More and more design wins, getting cpu's into all sorts of OEM's that they weren't before.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/186927/lenovo_launches_desktop_pc_with_amd_chips.html

Another one from Lenovo today. I'm reading this sort of stuff too much for it not to be making a difference.

 

[Guest]

AMD really needs to get more proactive instead of reactive - why is it Intel can catch most trends early (or start trends like with netbooks), whereas AMD catches the tail end or misses it entirely? They have access to the same market research tools, don't they?

If you read the interview with Dirk I posted http://www.itp.net/578576-exclusiv [...] ceo-of-amd you'll see that AMD have plenty of inroads to make in the classic arenas, ie notebooks. Why spend $hundreds of millions developing an atom-like chip when it is easier to make money by actually competing in the classic arenas?

AMD have their own set of technology to build around, ie graphics tech. What possible benefits could they offer over intel in netbooks?