FTC sues Intel for alleged monopoly abuse
By Paul Miller 
posted December 16th 2009 10:41AM
posted December 16th 2009 10:41AM
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posted December 16th 2009 10:41AM
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@kris120890 On sale at Dell? Gateway? No. Dell offered only one or two models with AMD, and those models were available with Intel too. The other 90% of the models were only available with Intel. Gateway embraced AMD a bit more, but still less than half their models were available with AMD.
Again, perhaps you could explain what you mean. Do you mean when you walked into a store you saw some AMD models and some Intel? Which store? Do you mean this represents a lot of stores? I dunno what stores were like in the UK (judging your nationality by your high street phraseology) but in the US for a period we did have a fair number of AMD machines in stores right around the time Core2Duo came out. Not 50%, but still perhaps 30% of the models on the floor. And home builds were probably more than 50% AMD (but already dropping, the peak was when Intel was forcing Rambus on people). But given that high end pre-built machines in stores were Intel and virtually all mail order sales were Intel, the sales were still vastly Intel.
@nrb
Comparing the performance of AMD and Intel at varying price points is some what difficult. Both sides have their own benchmarks saying their processor is better at a given task. The reality is that AMD is fast at integer calculations but Intels Floating Point Unit (FPU) is superior to AMD's and that is where almost 100% of the calculations for gaming and other processor intensive things are done.
@kris120890 No, Intel is faster at integer calculations too. Look at the file compression tests, Intel smokes AMD. And compressing files doesn't use any floating point.
I do agree that it's not always easy to compare benchmarks between Intel and AMD. I do believe that at a typical consumer price point, AMD gives you more for your money.
Let's pick $100 for example. I can buy a retail AMD Phenom II X2 3.1Ghz or an retail Intel Pentium Dual-Core 2.93Ghz. Which would you buy?
When you start pushing towards AMDs upper end, then it gets a lot more questionable. There's also more to consider at this point, like MB pricing.
The reason why AMD cannot compete with Intel at this very moment is an consequence of Intel abusing it's monopoly position.
@Pyronick Agreed!
Ironically, forcing a company which makes the best product to act in such a way that competitors who make inferior products can get a larger slice of market share is an anti-competitive practice that harms the consumer too. Think about that...
Who is John Galt?
@(Unverified)
John Galt is a fictional character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. Although he is absent from much of the text, he is the subject of the novel's often repeated question, "Who is John Galt?", and the quest to discover the answer.
@(Unverified)
You are an idiot. If intel actively undermined the free market they need to be slapped down.
@stabbytheicepic A true "free market" wouldn't even have a Federal Trade Commission.
So the government is going to take another billion from Intel and then what? Another 10,000 employees lose their jobs in an effort to save money. That should help the economic environment.
Yes, yes....thank you! Now those bastards will pay for using all their money to destroy my plan to make computer chips from actual chips...Fritos to be exact. I had it all mapped out and ready for production before them and their "science" and "technology" ruined the whole thing.
Now, where is my tinfoil hat?
what a bunch of asspained tossers. So what if they make a product better than the rest. are people going to sue walmart because they end up closing down surrounding stores because of better prices and availability?
everyone is blaming AMD's failures on intel. maybe it's AMD's fault for making such a shitty product compared to intel.
i buy intel why? umm because its just better than AMD. people have choices and they made theirs no the losers are just mad for sucking so much.
@(Unverified) You need to learn how to read. This isn't about Intel making good products. It is about them abusing their market position in order to prevent competitors from entering the market. For example by forcing OEMs to use GMA instead of ION - which is a better product.
@(Unverified) it has everything to do with it. it's all bs created by asspained CO's that don't like to lose so they run to the FTC to wipe their red beaten asses.
and so what about ION. No one is forcing these company's to use intel or their products are they? No. if a company really want to use ION go to a different chipset maker. There are other places to go for.
@(Unverified) Intel makes the best processors, but not the best graphic chipsets. These OEMs wants to mix the best of both, but Intel is preventing them.
@(Unverified)
Are you dense? It IS about them forcing companies to not use products such as ION. If Intel says to a company, use our stuff only, or you can have NONE of our stuff, which they have said to HP and Dell regarding Opteron in the Pentium 4 days, then the OEM's have no choice. AMD did not have the production means to supply 100% of the computers for Dell, and HP, they could only supply some fraction of them, meaning if Intel cut the OEM's off, they could literally not sell the computers. If you think that's a fair way to leverage power, then I'm pretty sure you're just a shill for Intel.
By the way, I fully acknowledge that Nehalem destroys Deneb. Intel has a superior product currently. That's not what this is about.
Ok, this is just another case of smaller companies pissing and moaning that they can't compete in an environment which they cornered themselves into. Back in the days before the Pentium it wasn't an uncommon practice to backwards engineer a competing companies' processor just to keep up with them, and Intel solved this problem with the Pentium patents, basically protecting their own assets through the law and forcing companies to start doing their own research. What happens. The smaller companies go out of business because they don't have proper research facilities. Now we are back to a handful of companies and only two of them are really in the fray when it comes to PC processors, Intel and AMD, the others only deal in small devices which Intel doesn't really even delve into all that much. So this comes down to the fact that in a 2 processor market Intel has a substantial lead over AMD, and AMD is mad about it. Who's fault is it? AMD's... Why? AMD came out with the first 64bit processor at a time when 64bit was substandard and not even functional, how did Intel respond? They came out with a 32bit Dual Core chip, which ran at about the same speeds as the 64bit system chips but would run a 32bit system properly without dumbing down of the equipment, which slows down the system. AMD still insists on selective board development on their processors, what does this mean, it means that if you buy the latest and greatest AMD processor you're stuck with one of a handful of boards because outside of their trusted plainer board developers nobody is allowed access to the chips until they are live, this ends up costing you just as much as buying the more reliable Intel system at the same speed unless you're willing to wait for other board manufactures to develop their AMD compatible boards. AMD is always behind Intel and can't catch up because they just don't think originally, they think to literally, Intel came up with a way of speeding up their processors without speeding them up, hyperthreading. What did AMD give us? Faster more costly processors, which still weren't actually faster, because they didn't want to figure out their own way of performing the same function. Intel also was smart and provided their running specs to companies like Microsoft and NVidia to make their chips more compatible with the products, what did AMD do, they bought out ATI and then made the ATI graphics cards more compatible with the AMD than Intel, now who's doing anti competitive practices.
When you break it down if you take comparable Intel and AMD processors they both pretty much are equal, but since the AMD's are about 6 months behind Intel the Intels end up being cheaper and more supported in the long run. AMD should stop complaining and actually put some work which is actually needed into their product, instead of releasing products that are behind in the market or too far reaching to be of any use.
@3dpenguin Learn to read. This is nothing about the competitors making worse product. It is about Intel abusing their monopoly position in order to prevent competitors from selling (better) products to OEMs.
Also learn to write in paragraphs.
@3dpenguin
^ THIS!
@3dpenguin
The FTC is a smaller company who is pissing and moaning? I thought it was the Federal Trade Commission attempting to enforce monopoly laws. I must be a fool!
@3dpenguin Core Duo (the dual 32-bit chip you speak of) came out two YEARS after Athlon 64 (Dec 2003 versus Jan 2006). It could hardly be considered a response to Athlon 64. This is only made even more obvious by the fast that AMD came out with dual core 64-bit processors (Athlon 64 X2) in May 2005 before Intel made their first dual core chip, Core Duo.
I don't know what timeline you lived through, but it wasn't reality.
@spin cycle
Still even the Athlon 64 X2 still had 32bit compatability issues, Intel responded with more of the same 32 bit chips until Microsoft released an actual working 64bit OS.
I keep seeing people saying maybe AMD should make a better product. From what I understand here, as a result of Intel's anti-competitive practices, AMD adoption and growth was limited by a significant degree not only at the consumer level but also with OEMs. Now if 75% of the people get Intel systems even if AMD has a better product, Intel's is most surely going to build more capital to commit to R&D. It's not going to be that easy for AMD to just build a better product. That's why AMD is in the state they're in now. Intel just has so much more behind it to toss at designing the next big thing.
@Brother Unit No 4
Therein lies the rub. Intel probably knew that by doing what it was doing, it would eventually be fined. However, they also knew that by the time people got around to fining them, they would have a near unsurmountable lead, and that the fines themselves would be pittance compared to what they earned as a result of those practices.
However, take heart in the fact that Intel stumbled all over Larrabee, making AMD the current graphics leader until at least mid 2010 when NVidia's Fermi comes out. Additionally, this failure of Larrabee will greatly reduce Intel's capability of responding to AMD Fusion when it is ready for launch. With a little energon and a lot of luck, AMD might be able to catch up in some kind of fashion; as an innovative CPU/GPU hybrid instead of raw CPU power. Bulldozer architecture looks like it will be at least a little more powerful than current Nehalem, if not completely trouncing it, but I suspect Intel will have the successor's to Nehalem out and playing by the time Bulldozer launches.
@Brother Unit No 4 Not quite. To sell a product you have to make it first (well, for the honest among us). CPUs are pretty interchangeable. The reason Intel commands the market power they do is because AMD does not have the production capacity to supply any of the major OEMs. You were never going to have 75% of people using AMD chips, because AMD has never been able to build that many. The big OEM market is high volume, low margin; you can't succeed in that market if you can't do the volume.
I was wondering at first why all those electronics companies would be playing Monopoly with Portsmouth Football Club, then I realised it's the FTC logo. Pretty similar!
Where's the money go that gets collected in fines? Where's my "reward" because I've been "harmed" as a consumer by these practices? Or does the money go into a war chest for the next government prosecution of another large business? It must be IBM"s trun to be under the microscope again, I think...
There will be a lot of "keep govt out of business" thoughts on this I'm sure.
Because, apparently, the goal of america is business profits.. rather than the goal of profit making businesses to be for the betterment of the american population.
If intel was allowed to go unchecked we would be paying $750 each for pentium 3s with an extra 4mb of cash right about now over the previous generation of desktop chipsets.
"Retrograde Mark"?