Intel forks over the $1.25 billion settlement to AMD, apparently had it 'just laying around'
By Paul Miller 
posted December 11th 2009 10:49AM
posted December 11th 2009 10:49AM
Remember that time you owed your buddy for the take out and then you found $20 in the couch? This is kind of like that. Except instead of "take out" we're talking "accusations of anticompetitive practices and stolen IP," and instead of "$20" we're referring to the $1.25 billion check that Intel just shot into the arm of AMD, as per agreement. Intel certainly isn't out of the woods yet with this anticompetitive stuff, but with the biggest CPU monkey off its back and some fancy patent cross-licensing between the companies, we should hopefully see the benefits of this in better and faster chips from both chip giants in the somewhat distant future.
Wow, that damn song just popped in my head when I saw the money. Damn you Geico!
@Poop Chef
Dear Engadget,
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
@Poop Chef
You know, I kinda feel like somebody's watching me.
Wow - I guess Intel has a really big couch!
@nuck44
"Tell me who's watchin'..."
GO AMD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Even if I believe all the crap AMD says Intel did (which I'm not sure if I do) I still don't buy that it caused anywhere near that much damage to their buisness, their crappy ass processors did. If they could engineer a chip that wouldn't be outperformed by anything intel makes, then they might have a chance, but I'd take my e6600 over a brand new AMD Chip, let alone an i7 or anything else current.
@Amnesia87
I agree with you that what Intel did in no way damaged AMD as much as they claim. However, these kind of anticompetitive tactics need be stopped so a message needed to be sent to Intel.
@Amnesia87
During these alleged anti-competitive business tactics AMD was making much better processors than intel (During the age of pentium 3s and 4s.) The Athlon64 (such as the FX-55) crushed anything intel had (even the p4 clocked @ 3.8Ghz). And do your remember the first dual cores (The Pentium D Smithsfield core vs Athlon X2). AMD embarrassed intel then.
@Amnesia87 Ironically it's comments like yours that are the reason for the settlement - AMD was routinely whooping Intel, whose product line had become stagnant in a Mhz pissing contest. Intel then got their game on, and as you say - their chips started to outperform the AMD equivalents. AMD looked closely at the Intel architecture, realized it looked 'familiar', sued Intel for a heap of stolen IP. Intel deny they have stolen any IP and as a friendly gesture have handed AMD $1.25 billion to see their perspective on the matter.
The interesting thing will be to see what AMD do with the cash - they have a lot of talented creative designers, a few years down the line we might see some great products.
@TC Have you even read what the litigation was about, it has nothing to do with IPs... it's an anti-trust suit regarding payoffs... They are saying Intel was paying off companies like Dell and HP to favor Intel chips and recommend them or not sell AMD at all.
That doesn't change the fact that AMD's current tech is crap.
And you are clearly ignorant of how much money these companies spend, if you think a billion dollars is enough to magically change that, you are a fool. A billion dollar's is less money than AMD has been losing annually for years now. And a billion is far less money than Intel or AMD spend of chip development.
AMD just went in the wrong direction, Intel went for high performance technology, and that allowed them to advance their tech so that their lower end processors were still high end performers, AMD went for budget tech, and now the gap is just widening.
Whether or not Intel's had the performance crown is not the question of the lawsuit. As mentioned by Amnesia87 Intel was paying OEMs to use Intel instead of AMD CPUs. This is beyond any issue with AMDs CPU performance and the easily given 1.25B may not be a lot for these giant companies but it does show that Intel knew that did wrong.
I noticed in B&M shops the ratio of Intel based computers to AMD based computer, it was quite disappointing.
@Amnesia87 Actually, yes it does affect them severely. Intel paid off HP and Dell not to buy AMD because their own products couldn't compete. Because of that, AMD lost revenue that would have been invested back into R&D to stay competitive. Meanwhile Intel, who had wads and wads of cash, jumped ahead in performnace with the C2D (usings AMD's own technology no less). You can't make a new processor out of thin air, and AMD is in a financial black hole because of what Intel did.
@Amnesia87
Actually one could argue that it was Intel's anti-competitive practices that led to AMD CPU's not performing as well.
It takes about 3 years from concept to launch to design a CPU, and in the 1999-2005 time frame (except for that blip with northwood), AMD was the undisputed performance king, yet their sales didn't really reflect that like it should have. Thus Intel's (presumed) anti-competitive practices led to AMD getting a far smaller return on their engineering investment than they would have, leading to engineering and process cuts which in turn affected the 2006-2009 CPU lines.
If AMD had been more profitable who knows how things would have played out.
Do they have a cheque handover ceremony? I would love to take part and uncork some champagne =D
Those Geico commercials always creep me the hell out.
@Lucas Yeah Me too. What's Up with the eyes? And I feel like stepping on that Lizard when I see it.
@Lucas Not as bad as those Burger King commercial, with the king in them. Those were creepy.
@penguinepcnerd Sleep in with the king!
As an Intel shareholder I'm kinda pissed about this. They had to do this because they're being blatant anti-competitive jerks, and if they'd gone to court they could've gotten hammered even worse. Intel needs to stop screwing with the markets and start competing with real innovation. That, or they need to be broken up into separate companies that will.
@mullingitover
Well, they've "innovated" themselves into the top-o-the-line worldwide chip-maker position, and regardless of whether or not I own AMD or Intel stocks I think AMD deserves a break. Without them we'd be suckin' down Atom N270's for 2+ more years! Innovation breeds competition, but that can't happen when cash is a major factor such as AMD's case. Whether or not they deserve the cash I'm not sure, but hopefully they take some of that and invest it in some more modern chip architectures. Intel is having to slow their new releases so that AMD can catch up, I want to see AMD serve up a big can of Whoop Ass on Intel, and soon.
@mullingitover : I don't think they are paying just because they have been anticompetive. There are stipulations that AMD will not testify against Intel in any indictment. Also, looks like Intel may be buying Nvidia, making the AMD issue away makes it easier to clear the deal
take a look at http://www.cringely.com/2009/12/intel-will-buy-nvidia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ICringely+%28I%2C+Cringely%29
There is nothing better than the spending your competitor's money on R&D! I'm wondering, as money is out of the way, what patents have been "cross-licensed" between the companies.. HyperThreading perhaps?
@(Unverified)
I think the patents were already in use... i.e. Patents AMD owned and intel was using (or vice-a-versa) - I dont think this will lead to new technologies making the jump from Intel to AMD.
@(Unverified) Well I am hearing rumours that they might be sharing the instruction set.. which means anything that is written for one processor would work on another.. sounds pretty cool
For a period of about 6 years AMD were ahead of Intel in terms of overall performance, performance per dollar, performance per clock, performance per watt and overall power usage. They were also far more innovative than Intel, moving the memory controller onto the processor, introducing multi-core processors and and introducing 64bit processors all way before Intel. If Intel hadn't abused their position AMD would probably have made a lot more than $1.25billion and would be in a much stronger position than they are today. Personally I think this settlement is a disgrace and vastly under values the damage Intel has done through their anti-competitive practices. I think the $2billion the EU fined Intel should also be given to AMD instead of wasted on the policies of corrupt, self-serving bureaucrats.
Hopefully AMD will use this $1.25billion for R&D so they can once again become competitive with Intel and return to innovating instead of playing catch-up.
@Frith
This better go into "Bulldozer", the 2 to 4 thread per core CPU from AMD coming in a year or two from now. I'm very excited about what that processor will bring. Dual core CPU with 8 threads sound good?
In actuality, I think most of the $1.25 will pay lawyer fees for years to come.
@Frith: AMD fucked up the 64-bit thing. Intel developed the Itanium architecture to take full advantage of what 64 bits could offer. AMD just stapled 64-bit onto the x86 architecture and everyone went along with it because all the old software didn't need to be re-written. Because of AMD, we're stuck with all of x86's shortcomings.
@Telanis
Well, that's what happened, but the fact that AMD was able to do that while maintaining compatibility was a good thing, even for Intel.
And if you want to point out the shortcommings of x86, point your finger to Intel, and if you want to point to the responsibles for this situation, it's Intel again, because they didn't gave the specifications for the x86 architecture to AMD when they were obligated to. And they did the same thing with the itanium aschitecture, forcing this situation...
@Telanis Meh, Itanium failed because VLIW requires really smart compilers, and they just couldn't write compilers smart enough to optimize code to have massive ILP gains at the compile stage. It seems like it's usually easier to get ILP gains at the hardware level than at the compiler level. The fact of the matter these days is that x86 compilers are already very optimized, so any alternative better have damn good compilers or it's not going to be able to compete even if the architecture has theoretical benefits.
Personally I'm a fan of Intel's processors, but this is good, because I'm all for FAIR competition. AMD could really use this to finally come back up and go neck and neck.
Still, I'm getting a PC early next year with an i7 so. Unless AMD can come up with something as good in about 3 months.
How dare Intel achieve success!!!
As a side note, Geico's "Kash" was my Halloween costume. Just sold it on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140364264350
(Not spam, as the auction is over.)
Now that you have a little bit of cash in your pocket, maybe you can pay someone to work on a Win7 driver for my TVWonder 650.
I've cut $2 million dollar checks at my job, but never $1.25 billion....
Now when will they settle with Nvidia and allow us to have some good chipsets?
@RITarded09
>NVIDIA
>good chipsets
I hope you are joking.
@RITarded09
No Nvidia does have good chipsets it's just that Intel has decided to make Nvidia's life as miserable as possible
Does anybody else agree that when you see these back and forth lawsuits, it reminds me of poker....it's really just raising, re-raising, call, see the turn card, OH another patent infringement, ok I call, let's go to the river.
In the end, they all have equal chip stacks ...
_(o)(o)_
|_|_$_|_|
$1.25 Billion, I bet AMD is having one hell of a Christmas party this year!
@KAL326 probably not as much as you might think, I'd guess their lawyers are getting at least 20%, so that cuts it down to about a billion, then you realize they lost $600 million this last quarter, who knows what the losses are this quarter (AMD hasn't actually made money in years).
It will certainly help them and all, but a billion dollars is no where near enough to magically make AMD profitable again.
Intel should put it on the corporate AMEX so every employee can fly for free somewhere.
I always feel like Somebody's Watching Me
http://www.geico.com/public/audio/somebodyswatchingme.mp3
(source: http://www.geico.com/about/commercials/music/kash)
Source has a Making Of video!
Well, it may not compensate AMD very well for the time that AMD was beating Intel with Athlon64 and X2 chips, but at least it is something. I'm waitin' for bulldozer, baby!
This is nothing compared to the 23B Goldman Sachs is paying out this holiday in BONUSES!!!! WTF!
Looking at that money makes me want to switch to Geico
I always feel like...Intel is watching meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!