Intel disputes the EU antitrust decision in regard to AMD

yeshua

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Aug 7, 2019
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Frankly speaking I've just got no words.

If I remember correctly their shenanigans to push AMD out of the market using bribes and whatnot were proven beyond a reasonable doubt. WCCFTech is reporting.

It's not like Intel is low on cash either. Why have they decided to dispute the decision/verdict/fine from ... 2014?
 
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Hitman928

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Apr 15, 2012
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Frankly speaking I've just got no words.

If I remember correctly their shenanigans to push AMD out of the market using bribes and whatnot were proven beyond a reasonable doubt. WCCFTech is reporting.

It's not like Intel is low on cash either. Why have they decided to dispute the decision/verdict/fine from ... 2014?

Seems like they've been fighting it ever since 2009 when it first happened. They appealed the 2014 decision and in 2017 the higher court said it could be re-evaluated so here we are (cases like this can take years to progress at every step). I'm guessing it has far less to do with the fine they were ordered to pay and more to do with Intel wanting to pull some of the same tricks they did before. If they can get the courts to overturn the decision then it would give them an opportunity to start offering the same types of "rebates" they did before when AMD was eating their lunch on the technology front.
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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I agree. The only way this makes sense, is if they get some of the mandates repealed, so they can pull the same crap on AMD now that its doing good. They can't beat them in performance, per watt, or price, but they can cheat and threaten and buy off customers. (if given the chance)
 

RetroZombie

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Nov 5, 2019
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I bet intel in it's own monopoly, want to make the others think the market is an open and free market.

The problem is that the definition of open and free market to companies like intel is that they want it to be free and open in a sense for them to do with it what ever they like and want to do, that's their definition of 'freedom' and 'openness'.
 
Mar 11, 2004
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This seems ill advised, as I think the EU has actually gotten more aggressive with regards to anti-competitive behavior. There's got to be something else, and no, I don't think its simply them wanting to pull the same shenanigans (hasn't there been hints they never stopped that stuff, they just changed how they went about it - i.e. they stopped doing it on the consumer side for instance but continue similar in servers/enterprise? plus their failed attempt to pay companies to use Atom to fight ARM - which maybe that's their argument "we couldn't possibly have harmed AMD, look we couldn't stop ARM by doing even more egregious stuff!").

I have a hunch this has to do with something else. Frankly, it makes me wonder if this doesn't have something to do with Raja and/or Jim Keller. Like Intel found out something about AMD from them. Heck, Nor would I be surprised if this was the start of an attempt at sabotaging AMD's x86 license or maybe patent related or something.
 
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joesiv

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If they win, they can start doing the same shady business again, and as timing would have it, Intel could really use some shady tactics for the years ahead.
 

TheELF

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Dec 22, 2012
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If I remember correctly their shenanigans to push AMD out of the market using bribes and whatnot were proven beyond a reasonable doubt. WCCFTech is reporting.
You are remembering extremely wrongly...
Intel never did any anti-trust things and AMD never did any patent overstepping,that's what a settlement is.

"On November 11, 2009, Intel Corporation (Intel) and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) entered into a comprehensive agreement to end all outstanding litigation between the parties, including antitrust litigation and patent cross license disputes (the “Settlement Agreement”). Intel agreed to pay $1.25 billion to AMD as consideration for the settlement within thirty days. Under the terms of the Settlement Agreement, AMD agreed to drop all pending litigation against Intel, including the case in the U.S. District Court in Delaware and the two cases pending in Japan. AMD also agreed to withdraw all of its regulatory complaints against Intel worldwide. AMD and Intel obtained patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement, and AMD and Intel relinquished any claims of breach from the previous license agreement. Intel also entered into a license agreement with Global Foundries, Inc., a manufacturing entity formed by AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Company. The parties agreed that the settlement was intended solely as a compromise of disputed claims, and was not to be understood as a concession or determination that either party has engaged in any wrongdoing. "



Also intel gave them 1.25bil at a time they were making about 6mil profit,a time that was so though on AMD they were forced to sell off their foundries because they had no money left after buying ATI which is what started this whole thing in the first place.
wa3pQt9.jpg
 
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Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
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You are remembering extremely wrongly...
Intel never did any anti-trust things and AMD never did any patent overstepping,that's what a settlement is.

"On November 11, 2009, Intel Corporation (Intel) and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) entered into a comprehensive agreement to end all outstanding litigation between the parties, including antitrust litigation and patent cross license disputes (the “Settlement Agreement”). Intel agreed to pay $1.25 billion to AMD as consideration for the settlement within thirty days. Under the terms of the Settlement Agreement, AMD agreed to drop all pending litigation against Intel, including the case in the U.S. District Court in Delaware and the two cases pending in Japan. AMD also agreed to withdraw all of its regulatory complaints against Intel worldwide. AMD and Intel obtained patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement, and AMD and Intel relinquished any claims of breach from the previous license agreement. Intel also entered into a license agreement with Global Foundries, Inc., a manufacturing entity formed by AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Company. The parties agreed that the settlement was intended solely as a compromise of disputed claims, and was not to be understood as a concession or determination that either party has engaged in any wrongdoing. "



Also intel gave them 1.25bil at a time they were making about 6mil profit,a time that was so though on AMD they were forced to sell off their foundries because they had no money left after buying ATI which is what started this whole thing in the first place.
wa3pQt9.jpg
What AMD agreed to has nothing to do with what Intel was actually doing. It was proven that they were paying companies NOT to use AMD products, and would withdraw their own discounts and availability if the companies would not agree or comply.
 
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RetroZombie

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Nov 5, 2019
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Before and after the Bribe Money
Well one less useful site with data to compare.

Now only going to use it to compare:
- amd r7 3700X vs ryzen r7 3800X
- intel i9 9900K vs i9 9900
- intel i7 7700K vs i7 7700
- intel i5 6600 vs i5 6500 vs i5 6400

Not even for intel i7 7700K vs i9 9900K is useful.
Only same architecture with the same specs, like the above examples.

Right now only notebookcheck.net and game-debate.com are reliable to me.
 

chrisjames61

Senior member
Dec 31, 2013
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What is also interesting is that it's the EU that has to defend other USA companies from dirty actions from one USA company.


You do realize that both Intel and AMD do business all over the world don't you? When you sell things in the EU you have to play by their set of rules. Unfortunately for us in the USA and fortunately for the Europeans they seem to take anti-trust laws way more seriously than we do here. If anti-trust laws here were enforced you wouldn't see abuses that hurt competing businesses and as a result would see lower prices. You would see real competition in wireless and broadband. None of which we have here.
 

gorobei

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Jan 7, 2007
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MooresLawisDead podcast just had an interview with the guy hired by the courts to monitor intel's prices/practices as part of the anti-competitive settlement.
apparently the EU penalty that intel will have to pay is being coordinated with the US govt. the amount will be announced soon. so now is the last chance to try to influence the blow.
he also covers the widspread outright ip theft intel was doing throughout the 80's and 90's (ie: cut and paste copy of cyrix's FPU) along with the intel inside kickback breakdown. there was also a tool provided to wall street firms that enabled them to reverse engineer intel units costs to enable prediction of future stock price(seemingly illegal). also european organized crime groups apparently have tendrils into intels sales chain (cpu unit sale/production count discrepancies and the cpus found on grey/black market)

he has a seeking alpha column where he goes thru the numbers that he reports to the court. apparently Krzanich inherited a mess of dirty practices he didnt know about and was trying to clean up some of it. also probably the reason he scheduled his stock sales so soon after taking the reins.
 
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RetroZombie

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You do realize that both Intel and AMD do business all over the world don't you?
World wide economy police then?
Let's imagine that in the USA some company is allowed to do (and doing) some practices that are considered completely illegal in the EU, should the EU by knowing that company illegal practices there, allow that company do business in the EU?

In my country for example there have been here many illegal business practices related to rapel/rappel, i don't even know why such thing exists in the first place. Anything that can be used to deceive the economy and/or the consumer should be simply put down.
 

Tuna-Fish

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Mar 4, 2011
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What AMD agreed to has nothing to do with what Intel was actually doing. It was proven that they were paying companies NOT to use AMD products, and would withdraw their own discounts and availability if the companies would not agree or comply.

Directly paying someone to not use AMD products would be clear abuse of monopoly position. What Intel did was that, but kind of sort of different, to a point where there is some leeway for argument.

The payment was in the form of purchasing marketing. If you went to a computer store at the time, you would see these huge ads with Intel Inside and the like hung up near the cpu shelves. Intel was paying the store big bucks for displaying those (on the order of substantially more money than the store actually made from the very slim margins of selling CPUs). The catch was that in order for Intel to pay for it next month, the store would have to meet a sales quota for Intel CPUs this month. This quota would be set by Intel for each month separately, and while they would not ever say that you were not allowed to sell AMD chips, if you did, every month they would hike up the quota for next month. When AMD was a small part of total sales of most stores, and regardless of what they did they were going to sell a lot more of Intel CPUs, losing that marketing money would be disastrous. So to avoid losing it, the stores would push Intel cpus more, until eventually they wouldn't even want to stock AMD cpus, at which point Intel would stop increasing the quota.

There are a lot of arguments why this is/should be illegal, but there were also many counterarguments. Notably, the system kind of fell down on it's own, and eventually AMD was selling literally every CPU they could make. Intel's current argument is seems mostly based on the idea that: "since this policy was not actually successful, it was not anticompetitive". This sounds wrong for me, but it's just another round in lawfare I guess.
 
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Hitman928

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Directly paying someone to not use AMD products would be clear abuse of monopoly position. What Intel did was that, but kind of sort of different, to a point where there is some leeway for argument.

The payment was in the form of purchasing marketing. If you went to a computer store at the time, you would see these huge ads with Intel Inside and the like hung up near the cpu shelves. Intel was paying the store big bucks for displaying those (on the order of substantially more money than the store actually made from the very slim margins of selling CPUs). The catch was that in order for Intel to pay for it next month, the store would have to meet a sales quota for Intel CPUs this month. This quota would be set by Intel for each month separately, and while they would not ever say that you were not allowed to sell AMD chips, if you did, every month they would hike up the quota for next month. When AMD was a small part of total sales of most stores, and regardless of what they did they were going to sell a lot more of Intel CPUs, losing that marketing money would be disastrous. So to avoid losing it, the stores would push Intel cpus more, until eventually they wouldn't even want to stock AMD cpus, at which point Intel would stop increasing the quota.

There are a lot of arguments why this is/should be illegal, but there were also many counterarguments. Notably, the system kind of fell down on it's own, and eventually AMD was selling literally every CPU they could make. Intel's current argument is seems mostly based on the idea that: "since this policy was not actually successful, it was not anticompetitive". This sounds wrong for me, but it's just another round in lawfare I guess.

I think the bigger issue was with OEMs (esp. server makers) than in the retail market and is more what Mark is referring to. AMD was having a hard to literally giving their CPUs for free to some OEMs just to try and get market penetration. The OEMs were essentially strong armed not to include AMD CPUs in their system or else the large intel rebates and co-marketing funds would disappear and there were claims that intel would also delay giving new CPU generations to OEMs who had AMD based models.
 

chrisjames61

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Dec 31, 2013
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Wasn't Qualcomm recently convicted of the same kind of practices Intel was doing? Double dipping on FRAND patents? Telling companies that if they bought competitors modems they would cut them off?