During the antitrust lawsuit, not everyone in our industry raced to support us - Steve 'Understatement' Ballmer
AS INTEL FLUSHES red with shame (or wronged outrage, depending on one's point of view) and holds a series of nearly back-to-back press conferences denying its guilt, it comes as little surprise that AMD has been bouncing off the walls with glee all morning, after the EU commission found Chipzilla guilty of antitrust behaviour.
"Today's ruling is an important step toward establishing a truly competitive market," said Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and CEO. "We are looking forward to the move from a world in which Intel ruled, to one which is ruled by customers," he added.
Tom McCoy, AMD's executive vice president for legal affairs said, "Intel broke the law and consumers were hurt," adding that, "with this ruling, the industry will benefit from an end to Intel's monopoly-inflated pricing and European consumers will enjoy greater choice, value and innovation."
On the Twitter scene, AMDers - from Nigel Dessau to senior veeps, lesser veeps and run of the mill employees - had a field day, sending out tweets like: "Intel 0-3 in antitrust: Japan ('05), Korea ('08), EU ('09). US FTC and NY state are investigating" and "If you can afford to pay the speeding ticket, is it OK to speed whenever you like?"
It does seem that spIntel, even with its army of lawyers and PR experts has thus far failed to convince any antitrust enforcement agency its business practices are beyond reproach.
The company was fined about $25.4 million by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) back in 2008 on grounds the firm abused its dominant position by coercing and cajoling customers with cash on the condition they use only Intel chips. Like the EU, the KFTC also found Intel guilty of giving cash incentives to customers agreeing to delay the launches of AMD products or not develop products using AMD chips.
The KFTC also found, "South Korean consumers had to buy PCs at higher prices as domestic PC makers were forced to buy Intel's pricier CPU." Intel, naturally, is in the process of appealing that ruling.
KFTC aside, however, Intel was also given a slap on the wrist by Japan back in 2005, when that country's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) ruled Intel had violated anti-monopoly laws by illegally forcing five Japanese PC makers to accept full or partial exclusivity. Intel did not appeal that ruling.
Jumping on the AMD gleeful vindication bandwagon, Global Foundries - littler chipper's fab spin off - has issued a statement saying, "today is an important day for our industry and technology consumers worldwide."
Then, rather randomly, the statement went on to claim "The EU ruling not only supports a competitive marketplace but also helps make the construction of our new facility in New York and the creation of new advanced manufacturing jobs in the region a reality."
We sort of fail to see how the EU verdict has any effect whatsoever on Global Foundries building a chip fab in upstate New York, since AMD made that decision some years ago, but we'll put it down to the giddy excitement reverberating throughout the non Intel-inside world. µ
They will be appealing this for years.
As ususal the lawyers win.
As usual the piece of crap corrupt EU squeezing big companies for money. Just like they did to MS.
1GPz (1GPoundZ) barrier shattered!!!
Death to Intelfidels!
AMD are a bunch of wining children.
How about they stop spenind money hand over fist on Bad CEOs, law suits and crappy aquisitions and start actually making something that people will buy.
AMD lost a competative edge in the 90's with the K5 arguably one of the worst CPUs ever made.
They tried to get back with the K6-II and III but over priced them to make back the money lost on the K5.
Then came the Athlon (basically an x86 Alpha) they had a real competior and gained market share in the most porfitable section the Enthusiast/DiY market.
Next came the A64, again ahead of Intel and a favorit of the Enthusiast and DiY builders. But AMD wanted the OEM money, they gave HUGE discounts to Dell, HP and others to get their foot in the door.
By doing this they cut of their most loyal and profitable market. they raised prices over 30% on reatail CPUs
Then they hire idiot Ruiz for a rediculous amount of money, he buys ATi for more than it was worth and they botch barcellona.
Wow!So you can sue someone for your own bad business practices and crappy products.
That is a great precident. I am going to sue Donald Trump because he makes more money than me. Brb...
ehmm, hitting a better runner in a knee so his near-hopeless competitors have a chance to catch up called a fair competition now? EU...
intel core is clearly superior to amd offerings. i love my quad. that said i still use (and going to use in future )AM2 stuff for lower end, "daily web browser" machines i build due to nice and cheap platform delivering sufficient performance for the task.
FTC should have slapped Intel a while ago. Why they went after MS instead is beyond me. Athlon & XP dominated P3's and P4's (.18us) in every respect and yet Athlon machines were not introduced by any major OEMs. The Intel's monopolistic rebates was common knowledge and prevent many Athlon based models from being introduced by HP, Compaq, IBM and the likes. Only when the antitrust threat get large enough did Intel pull back the rebates and OEMs began introducing AMD machines.
Intel ripped of its (forced) costumers and some of these sheeple are even defending Intel.
You got betrayed and instead of seeking justice, you are defending the criminal and attack the victims.
Intel fanboys, the lowest possible lifeform.
Some of you are commenting on how the EU is punishing Intel for having a better product.
Clearly you don't understand the suit or the verdict as neither have ANYTHING to do with analyzing which product is better.
It's all about how Intel bullied it's customers (OEMs) into buying only (or mostly) Intel. Another article I read said that AMD offered FOR FREE 1 million processors to an OEM but the OEM refused.
Why? Because they had an agreement with Intel that they wouldn't sell more than X% of AMD chips or they would lose their preferred pricing. Instead they could only accept 130,000 chips for free.
Now tell me that's not anti-competitive practices or a monopoly exploiting the market.
"Intel, naturally, is in the process of appealing that ruling."
I'm in the process of asking why not just drop the use of "in the process of". It's marketspeak used to make things sound more important. I hope you are in the process of reading this comment and sequentially will be in the process of reflecting upon this.
In the process of signing off,
egil
Oligopolies do too. Laissez faire is dead and Americans are retards. What a bunch of toadying corporate lapdogs. How corporate interests became more important than people is a wonder of the modern age.
KFTC, mmm...
Are you blind?
You can buy either from a retailer if you want.
OEMs do the same thing with the sovel ware they push on you. Yet I do not see anyone going after Macaffe or Symantec for this policy
An OEM is the Intel customer, they are the ones that choose or choose not to buy a CPU or Chipset.
If you do not like it don't buy a package box. Build your own.
If AMD wants more market share quite acting like RAMBUS and suing but make a better product.
AMD offers discounts and rebates too, funny how that it not anti-competative.
But when Intel does it is. So whent the manufacturer of a car offers Loyalty cash and rebates for you to stick with them they should be used and fined? If so where are these suits?
Again AMD was looking to even the playing field nothing more, they had crap when all this started and they cried to the courts.
I have lost all respect for them.
If they want my buisness back they need to EARN it not sue to get it.
Intel sale reps are like rats. They searched for any "AMD" logos/labels in the trash cans and dumpsters around the building before approving the rebate for my friend's shop. He owned a PC shop in San Jose. My friend has no choice, Intel or AMD. He is ashamed to tell my customers that he can not affort to sale PC with AMD inside.
Bad! Intel Bad!
pricier CPU's. Yes. Intel have the technological upperhand over AMD. Yes, Phenom II was good, but it can't compete with i7. You'll argue that i7 is costlier, but i5 is going to be launched soon and it's basically just an i7 with one less memory channel and on-die PCIe controller. AMD have nothing to compete with that. This will cause Intel to price i5 higher when we could be getting i5 at normal Intel mid-end price-range. They'll continue to sell Core 2's at lower prices to compete with AMD in the lower price-range.
Looks like Intel is starting to smell around the world, it is pretty pathetic when such a large company goes to such extremes to put a smaller one out of business.
and yet the fan boy's scream foul like Intel is going to hear them and give them a special break on their next purchase lol
ya right had Intel succeeded in putting AMD out of business they wouldn't have been able to find a processor for less than a thousand and forget about innovation there I 7 now is basically a plagiarized version of the AMD on die memory controller with a few material improvements.
and yes AMD has certainly made some mistakes not too long ago but that's no excuse for trying to kick them to death while they're down.
so if some corporate Brown nozers want to scream foul that's fine I'm just glad the rest of the world isn't going to take it any more and judging from what I see happening in malta I don't think Intel is gonna like what they hear coming out of there either.
Hung out.
what'll be its excuse when it still can't sell its crap processors? Complain to the EU because Intel makes a better processor?
I find it interesting that as long as AMD was beating Intel back in the A64 days, they didn't care about this stuff. When they rode that gravy train for all it was worth and didn't have anything worthwhile, then bring out the lawsuits.
I'm not saying Intel hasn't done anything shady. However, AMD's worst enemy over the last few years hasn't been Intel, it's been AMD. They keep shooting themselves in the foot with paper launches, delays, and bad marketspeak.
When Intel's not an excuse, what will be their excuse for AMD's failings? Can they really hack it in an "equal" market? Given their management and the need for a sugar daddy, I'm pretty skeptical.
Come on ssj4Gogeta, do you really think that forcing Intel to play on a level playing field will put prices up? That's silly.
If the market is wide open then all suppliers, Intel and AMD, have to compete on price and product. Not blackmail, coerce and bribe retailers and manufacturers into using costlier products.
An open and fair market reduces prices. Intel corrupted the market in order to falsely put prices up.
Intel made a fortune out of all of us who bought a pc. Prices will drop because of this.
Intel's management should be facing criminal charges of corruption and bribery.
FINE TIME LIMIT IS 3 MONTHS
Intel have 3 months to pay the fine in full, regardless of the appeal. That is the rule of law in Europe. The fine can be returned to Intel if their appeal is successful.
... of whether Intel actually will have to pay the fine or not:
Intel is likely to do 2 things:
a) speed up the tick-tock strategy a bit
b) take off the gloves
With this EU verdict AMD is simply causing Intel become Intel even more vital and vigorus - even under an EU-approved marketing programme.
Spirits that I've cited
My commands ignore.
You didn't really refute my arguments.
I'm not really sure what you mean by AMD didn't care about this stuff when they were riding the gravy train. AMD's been pursuing this since 2001...you know, when Athlon XP was handing the P4 its ass, but they still couldn't seem to really break into the big time. Or how from 2003-2006, Athlon64 was unrivaled in performance, yet they couldn't get above 25% market share?
Reality check, all ye unINTELligent fanbois: K6 owned Pentium MMX, K7 destroyed P3/early P4, K8/K9 dealt the deathblow to Netburst, and Opteron owned Xeon until like 5 minutes ago when Nehalem-based 2P chips came out. Despite it's losses in the last few years, AMD should be swimming in money from it's performance leadership for the better part of 8 years. But they're not, and it's all and only the result of Intel's monopolistic tactics.
@ Nemo: Gosham I glad those "retarded" Americans invented the transistors, microprocessor, and internet you're using right now to spread your enlightened message to the masses.
In all fairness to interested_party you don't really have an argument to refute. Everything you said is true (and in perfect agreement with interested_party's points) with the exception of the first line attempting to link the future cost of CPUs to the present court ruling. Yes, I would fully expect to see i7 and i5 prices stay high, and Core2 to stick around longer than it should given the availability of the newer parts. That has nothing to do with losing this antitrust case though, and everything to do with AMDs present position in the market (which as Ryan noted is probably not what it would be if Intel hadn't been monkeying around with the market in the first place). You never know, though, maybe Intel will repent and surprise us all by advancing CPU technology and pricing willingly from now on, rather than only when they're forced to because AMD is giving them a royal spanking.
You have your time line a tad skewed. The Pentium II and the K6 were head to head The K6 was a response after AMD bought NexGen to compete with the pentium II not the MMX (which was put out over a year prior to the K6).
Plus it was not until the K6-III that AMD had anything to reallu challenge the PII in the gaming market. K6-II was good for manythings but laked the instructions for fast gaming at the time.
K6-III brought that to the table and for the first time AMD was able to compete head to head with Intel.
Intel's Quad Core Xeons kick AMD's opterons around in a respects bringing in lightwiave render times hours faster for a full length feature.
AMD ONLY had an adavnatage in power consumption.
AMD lost it with the introduction of the AM2 it was a joke and still is.
Just like Barcelona and although Phenom II is better it still cannot compete.
Plus think of the money they lost under Ruiz (who was and still is the highest paid AMD employee) the ATI purchase was stupid with AMD not having a competavie product and not enough manufacturing capacity to keep up with OEM demand.
.
"I'm not really sure what you mean by AMD didn't care about this stuff when they were riding the gravy train. AMD's been pursuing this since 2001...you know, when Athlon XP was handing the P4 its ass, but they still couldn't seem to really break into the big time. Or how from 2003-2006, Athlon64 was unrivaled in performance, yet they couldn't get above 25% market share?"
Did you ever think that it might have had something to do with production? AMD would never be able to supply more than 25% of the market because they didn't have the chip fab capacity that Intel did. Is it really that hard to grasp?
Now let's go on further. AMD shuts down Austin, leaving 1 or 2 fabs in Dresden. How many fabs does Intel have? A lot more.
Even if AMD could (and I believe they did at some points) sell every chip they could make, they still didn't have enough fab capacity to meet demand. Who fills up that slot? Intel. Intel gets 75% marketshare by default simply because AMD can't keep up with demand. Crippling Intel wouldn't have helped AMD as they could only produce so many chips. Someone else had to supply those chips, good, bad or indifferent: Intel.
AMD also pretty much banked on Intel not being able to correct itself. Yes, the P4 sucked compared to the Athlon. AMD had issues - the chipset. Via couldn't make a bug free one to save its life. A64 did very well and outperformed the Prescotts - no doubt. That's why I bought one. The nvidia chipsets were far from bug free, and ultimately sent me back to Intel when the C2D's came out.
But please don't patronize me about the K6 beating the original Pentium. I owned both and the K6 was a dog.
Look at it this way, in a lot of cases, AMD was playing catch up. They could see what Intel was doing, improve on it, and release something that could perform as good as or better. That was true up until the P4 when they took the lead. And yes, even when AMD took the lead toward the tail end of the P3 and could produce when Intel couldn't, they also charged more than Intel. Many don't remember that a 1GHz Athlon cost more than a 1GHz P3 at the time.
AMD wasted its opportunities. It relied on 3rd parties too much, didn't invest as much as should have in fab capacity, and bought ATI for way too much money.
You can't sell what you can't fab. That, if anything, was the biggest marketshare cap on AMD. Not Intel.
Did Intel force their customers to accept the rebates and kickbacks? NO! The PC makers gladly and greedily pocketed all that extra cash. If a consumer wanted to buy AMD, there were lots of vendors selling AMD chips in their PCs.I guess I just don't see how the consumers were hurt by this, which is what the EU claimed. EU, find a way to punish the vendors and there might not be any problems.
If Intel have to pay this fine, they'll definitely try to extract the money from the consumers, just like every company does.
"which as Ryan noted is probably not what it would be if Intel hadn't been monkeying around with the market in the first place"
See Jim Johnson's argument. They didn't have the fab capacity to produce for a larger market share, even if Intel hadn't been "monkeying around with the market".
Or did they just stop reading and contributing to Daily Tech?
Reading some of the comments posted here it's clear that we have a vast tract of Neo Con (G Dubya-Loving) Red Necks reading the Inq.
You know the type:
1) I fill my car up with enough gas to make a CO2 fog that would cover Europe, cos I don’t live there. I can afford to do it and how dare anyone tell me otherwise.
2) I can decide to wage war on anyone that disagrees with my point of view, cos I don’t live there, I can afford to do it and how dare anyone tell me otherwise.
3) I live in a country where money talks (N.B. he means, that if you’re poor then your option doesn’t count)
4) Point 3 some more: I can buy off anybody because I can afford it (e.g. Intel) regardless of what people might want; they get what I can influence. That’s right and fair because I can do it.
5) More of 4: I live in a free country (so he thinks) and I can do exactly what I want with my money that I worked hard for. Regardless of the effect this has on other people, I can afford to do it and how dare anyone tell me otherwise.
6) More of 5: I have enough money to lobby politicians to get what I want! This means we get to vote in a bi-polar democracy in which both sides stand for the two biggest money groups in my country. What a wonderfully fair system and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
7) I’ve sometimes travelled outside my country, but I’ve been in a bubble of delusion that these other countries take tax from their people and pay for a national health service. I know that means healthcare for everybody, but I wouldn’t give any of my money towards such a scheme. Why should I pay for anybody else’s healthcare? Then again, I’ve never been seriously ill, so I’m not worried. I can also pay the extortionate insurance costs of my plan; trouble is it doesn’t cover me for long-term illness and has a load of other clauses excluding many other conditions I may develop. Anyhow, those commie suckers still pay less than I do. It must be because my standard of healthcare is way better than theirs?
8) Anyone who criticizes my way-of-life is a Liberal, commie-loving, Bolshevik (Get Joseph McCarthy on the phone, Now!)
9) I know what I’m talking about because I hear it on the radio and see it on the TV. Despite all the media being under the same control as the politicians; they tell me exactly how it is. Ask me anything and I’ll regurgitate MSNBC, FOX NEWS... you name it, I’ll tell you!
10) We are a free market economy! (yeah, right?) We are a free country! (yeah, right?) We are a democracy! (ummm... Yawn...)
11) The words arrogance, narcissism, ignorance, stupidity, prejudiced: they all seem to fit, but they don’t mean me? It’s those European commies!
12) I saw a movie once. I think it was French with those damn subtitles, why can’t they speak American? (Eh?) It showed that growing as a nation over thousands of years is a very painful process, but they did get it sorted out in the end. Mind you, a lot of people got killed in the process! I guess we did pretty well over the past 200 years. (You think so? Check with Amnesty International and count the number of wars you’ve had since then)
13) Those lazy commies make me sick. We work hard in this country. (You sure do! 6-7 day weeks, 2 weeks vacation - unless you’ve been ill and had to use some of your vacation days for that – more suicides, stress, depression, serious crime, therapists and worry than any other peoples in Europe)
14) Weapons of Mass Destruction (Oh, those. Did you find them?) No, but we got in there and we’ll come out of there with a lot of oil paid to us as debt for invading them – let alone all the contracts to re-build the place after we blew it up and totally destabilized the area.
15) Listen, how much longer is this going on cos’ I got a warehouse full of problems I need to get off my chest before I see my shrink. Otherwise, I’ve got some Kool Aid under the sink! (Don’t worry, we understand. Just do me a favour will you?) You name it!
(STFU and when in Rome, do as the Romans do?)
I’ll take a rain check on that as I’m off to see my shrink......
(Thought as much......)
Kudos once again go to Mrs. Smit-Kroes for rising above the traffic department (literally) and help get rid of antitrust scum worldwide.
Owww... wait... we can just narrow that down to the US.
So, help get rid of US antitrust scum, worldwide.
Now why isn't the good Obama gov. doing anything about this ? I smell another antitrust case. Could be against the US government itself ?!
Can't wait for Neelies next move ! gg !
Punishment is suppose to be a deterrent. A 1.5 Billion fine is just the cost of doing business for Intel who routinely violates anti-trust laws, just like Microsucks. A 500 BILLION Euro fine and prison time for the CEO would be an appropriate dis-incentive to violate law.
How can anyone defend Intel's' actions in this case. AMD clearly had equivalent or better cpu's at one point (2002 thru 2007). It was however unable to capitalize on the product superiority due to the unfair practices of a much larger competitor. AMD should have been able to gain market share at that time, and been able to reap the corresponding profits to reinvest in R&D. The result obviously would have been a much stronger AMD able to deliver more competitive products now.
I think you're stretching a bit on AMD's competitiveness. C2D's came out in 2006 and AMD only relatively recently came up with an answer.
Regardless, you can make all the "coulda shoulda wouldas" all you want. However, one fact remains: when AMD had the money to invest in R&D, fabs, etc, they made a bad investement and bought ATI. Great, they have a video card maker, but what has it done for them? Well, it makes them some money and is arguably one of the only profitable parts of AMD right now, but it doesn't pull in nearly enough money to offset the losses.
The only way AMD could be on "even footing" with Intel is to match or exceed its output capacity and make chips of equal or better capability. Instead, of AMD pissed its money away.
AMD will NEVER be on equal footing, fines, anticompetitiveness or not, if it's not investing in what will make the company money and pissing it away on bad management.
Hector ran the company into the ground.
If you read any of Ed Stroligo's columns over the years, it told the same story about AMD: living in its dreamworld and ignoring potential problems until it kludges something together. Socket 939 w/ DC DDR wasn't even on the radar until nearly release time. AMD's pretty much ignoring the low power market and kluding a Sempron to fit in that slot. And so on and so forth. You can't beat your competitors with half assed solutions.
If AMD really wanted to be competitive, it should have invested in R&D and fab capacity and NOT have gutted those when it was needed most.
We can argue about Intel being bad all we want, but the fact of the matter is that AMD can never produce what the market would need with its fab capacity and Intel could. It didn't matter who had the better processor or not. It mattered who could meet the demand. Why do you think AMD procs became a lot more scarce once Dell got into the picture? AMD couldn't produce enough to keep both OEMs and the channel happy. Guess who lost? The channel.
Thanks Dave , of all the comments I enjoyed your the most. I like to see the truth be told.
Money is a LIMITED rescource, So those greedy ,arrogant, self-worshipping , thieving horders that take the most ,leave others without for purely selfish/self-centered reasons that make the poor starve and suffer without.
(If the bible is true about "you are your brothers keeper" , then look how they CHOOSE to help their brothers/others.)
Trickle down economics equals : "If you let my greedy @ss make 20+ million a year I will buy a bigger home and hire another gardener and maid for minimum wage so I am helping the economy see !
US computer manufacturers were actually losing out too do to Intel's licensing deals. Sure they got some kickbacks at first, but they were hurting themselves in the long term, that is because if a customer really wanted to get an AMD box they would have to buy foreign brand(Acer, Toshiba) which were not that easily influenced by intel, instead of domestic brands(Dell, HP, Apple even, maybe?). WHY DID apple go with the Intel chips after POWER even thou AMD chips were better at that time? Interesting. I guess now we know why..
At least the Obama Administration has recently made it clear that it is going to very aggressive in enforcing anti-trust laws so signs aren't good for Intel in the US neither.
ROTFLMAO..
did you just say "thieves will now steal more often because the law is harsh on thieft and being a thief is now riskier so they have to do it more often and steal more shit every time to yield sustainable living out of being a thief" !!?
LOL
@Jim Johnson,
I think you work for intel... because your comment seem to make sense, but deep down are all FUD and BULLCRAP.
is AMD buying ATI a bad move? well how do you know? like you said ATI IS the only part of AMD that is currently making money. also moving forward every player need to do both GPU and CPU - intel has been working on Larabee for 3 years now, NV is risking law suits developing CPUs. AMD was forced to do the same, so they bought ATi - something they could afford and had a significant market presence and advanced techonologies. did they pay more than its worth? that is hard to say because X360 and Wii was going to dominate and ATi was in them. and as it turn out X360 and Wii are currently dominating and thus ATi is making good money. I am sure behind the scenes there are other developements going on as well so no one can tell tell if ATi really was too expensive for what AMD paid for.
This is all about the EU Mafiosi skimming off profits from big business,it's NOT about seeking redress for consumers.
Consumers can pick & choose what PC's they buy,or build & the practises of the likes of M$/Intel make absolutely no difference to consumer choice,as long as they are aware of what goes on behind the scenes.
The ONLY question remaining is, who's NEXT!
EU parliament needs an El Guido..Pronto,
DON'T vote for any of them in the coming elections.
The result of this fine will hit AMD customers most,because it will stimulate Intel to greater efforts in winning market share,bringing big gains for PC users.
The outcome for AMD fanbois will be a continuation of MEDIOCRITY...juump on your milk float AMD fanbois, my ferrari is just around the corner...SUCKERS!
I understand your logic. And I think you make a valid point about manufacturing capacity. However, I think it's fair to say that, where AMD's capacity trained in with Athlon/AthlonXP/Athlon64, they would have inked a deal like they did with Chartered for the dual core Athlons. The fact that it took years for them to reach the point of purchasing more capacity is a direct result of Intel's practices. If this point isn't sufficiently clear, remember even further back, when AMD 386/486 were just as good if not better than Intel. Things were going pretty good for them. Granted, K5 didn't live up to expectations. Then again, Intel's execution wasn't exactly stellar either.
For some reason, the mid 90's saw some weird shift in mentality that Intel was the One, and AMD or anyone else was just the option of last resort. I mean, Dell used to buy buckets full of AMD 486. But did they carry K6, K6-II/III, Athlon/Athlon XP, or Athlon 64? Nope. Curiously, it wasn't until late 2006 that Dell thought AMD was good enough to start selling again, which, coincidently, was just prior to the release of the Core 2 Duo. Coincidence? I think not. It doesn't take a genius to see that money was changing hands between Intel and Dell. Unless of course you believe that Dell decided, after three years of AMD dominance, but JUST before Intel brought a superior product to market (which was certainly known to Dell), that it was time to break their Intel-only business plan in favor of offering their customers soon to be inferior AMD products. Either Dell was intentionally Dull (pun intended), or else they were on the take from Intel to not sell AMD, then "encouraged" by that selfsame chip company to stast selling a limited number of their competitors products so as to avoid anti-trust issues. And, as much as I might think sometimes, the folks at Dell are not THAT stupid.
As for the K6 vs Pentium point, I must humbly disagree. I owned both of them as well; K6 was noticably swifter. Indeed, it was competitive with the early PII's. See: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,22-10.html.
If you still believe AMD was behind with K6-I/II/III, you can't argue that K7 crushed PIII. From that point on, AMD should have been swimming in money. They weren't.
"I think you work for intel... because your comment seem to make sense, but deep down are all FUD and BULLCRAP."
The sure sign of an intelligent argument coming up ... :rolleyes:
"is AMD buying ATI a bad move? well how do you know?"
Um, how about the continuous writedowns on ATI's value to the tunes of $880 million, $1.68 billion, and $684 million?
http://www.forbes.com/2008/07/11/advanced-micro-devices-markets-equity-cx_mp_0711markets32.html
http://www.itchannelplanet.com/enterprisenews/article.php/3722521
http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/48903-amd-announces-job-cuts-salary-reductions.htm
Would you consider writing down over $3 billion of a $5 billion investment a good investment?
"like you said ATI IS the only part of AMD that is currently making money."
I said it made money. Not very much. I made $1 million last quarter. That includes video cards, Wii, etc.
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13298&Itemid=35
http://www.overclockers.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4408:amdearn&catid=57:processors&Itemid=4263
If you think $1m (Q1 09) and $13 million are enough to save a company that's losing many more millions ... yeah, it looks like a great investment.
"also moving forward every player need to do both GPU and CPU - intel has been working on Larabee for 3 years now, NV is risking law suits developing CPUs. AMD was forced to do the same, so they bought ATi - something they could afford and had a significant market presence and advanced techonologies."
Is it needed? Probably. Did AMD have to buy ATI? Nope. There are a lot of things it could have done that could have gotten the same results. AMD could have bought a stake in ATI. They could have partnered with them and signed an exclusive deal with them. They didn't have to buy them.
"did they pay more than its worth? that is hard to say because X360 and Wii was going to dominate and ATi was in them. and as it turn out X360 and Wii are currently dominating and thus ATi is making good money. I am sure behind the scenes there are other developements going on as well so no one can tell tell if ATi really was too expensive for what AMD paid for."
Again, look at the financials. $3.2 billion in writedowns proves AMD paid way too much for it. Wii costs less than $100 to make. How much of that do you think AMD makes? Do you consider $1 million and $13 million to be good money to a company like AMD?
ATI does some good things ... I love their graphics cards. But AMD has to stay afloat long enough to make any of that come to fruition. They invested too much money at a bad time when they could have invested in other things.
Ryan ... I'll get back to you later. Gotta get back to work. :)
Screw work. I'm quitting this job tomorrow anyway. :D
"However, I think it's fair to say that, where AMD's capacity trained in with Athlon/AthlonXP/Athlon64, they would have inked a deal like they did with Chartered for the dual core Athlons. The fact that it took years for them to reach the point of purchasing more capacity is a direct result of Intel's practices. If this point isn't sufficiently clear, remember even further back, when AMD 386/486 were just as good if not better than Intel. Things were going pretty good for them. Granted, K5 didn't live up to expectations. Then again, Intel's execution wasn't exactly stellar either."
I don't know that that would have happened. Back then, Jerry was in charge and he was of the mindsent "Real men have fabs." He seemed more intent on opening up his own fabs (which I think was a good decision). I think where he'd have run into problems with outsourcing was that the SOI fab technology they were using was much more difficult to implement and getting a third party ramped up on that when AMD had such a hard time doing it.
"For some reason, the mid 90's saw some weird shift in mentality that Intel was the One, and AMD or anyone else was just the option of last resort. I mean, Dell used to buy buckets full of AMD 486. But did they carry K6, K6-II/III, Athlon/Athlon XP, or Athlon 64? Nope. Curiously, it wasn't until late 2006 that Dell thought AMD was good enough to start selling again, which, coincidently, was just prior to the release of the Core 2 Duo. Coincidence? I think not. It doesn't take a genius to see that money was changing hands between Intel and Dell. Unless of course you believe that Dell decided, after three years of AMD dominance, but JUST before Intel brought a superior product to market (which was certainly known to Dell), that it was time to break their Intel-only business plan in favor of offering their customers soon to be inferior AMD products. Either Dell was intentionally Dull (pun intended), or else they were on the take from Intel to not sell AMD, then "encouraged" by that selfsame chip company to stast selling a limited number of their competitors products so as to avoid anti-trust issues. And, as much as I might think sometimes, the folks at Dell are not THAT stupid."
I think you misjudge some of what was going on that time. Up until the P2, with Socket 7 and below, AMD could be a drop in solution that was pin compatible with an Intel chipset and processor. Thus to Dell, it didn't matter what chip was put in there as they would all work. It was whatever they could get at the best price. Cyrix could have been thrown into that mix as well (I remember my old man doing Cyrix 486 builds).
Support and manufacturing become the monkeys in the situation. If they all use the same parts like in the 486 days, you only needed one line and support for one model. Something changes, and then manufacturing and support costs go up.
The other thing to remember is that Intel went to a slot architecture with the P2 and changed the bus. AMD had a license to the original S7 bus but not to the P2 bus. So it stuck with S7 in the K6/II/III series until it developed the Athlon.
Now going back to the support and manufacturing bit, more product lines increases complexity for manufacturing and support, thus driving up the cost. Each OEM had a decision to make: pick a company and stick with it or suck up the costs of multiple product lines. Some chose to stick with a vendor (like Dell did with Intel) and others used both.
Did money change hands? Possibly. I don't know the terms of the deals. Maybe Intel bribed Dell. Maybe Dell got much better deals due to buying more Intel chips than spreading them out from both.
That said, now let's take a look at the Athlon chips. Did AMD have a better chip? Arguably so until the Coppermines, then they were pretty much on par and trading blows. Intel's issue became one of manufacturing. However, AMD's problem wasn't the quality of the processor but that of chipsets. I know there will be those that disagree with me, but Via's chipsets were pretty much pig shit IMO. Tons of problems, shitty drivers, and so forth. There was no real standard in that arena with Via, SiS, ALi, Via/AMD hybrids, etc. Then later, Nvidia.
Intel's processors may not have been as good, but they had rock solid chipsets (aside from the Rambus debacles, but even then they did the right thing and recalled it). 815E was a tank, as was the 850E. They worked, and just worked well.
Also during a lot of that time, AMD became more expensive than Intel, so Intel was more of a value processor. I remember buying a 700 that I overclocked to 933 simply because it was cheaper than buying an Athlon at the time. Bang for the buck works both ways. :D
I'll tell you as a sys admin at the time, I wouldn't have run AMD even if they had better performance simply because of the chipsets.
Now let's get to the A64. AMD blew Intel out of the water with those, esepcially on the X2's. I owned one of them. Intel had nothing compelling at the time, and AMD became very difficult to ignore. The Northwood P4's were decent, but the Prescotts sucked. They couldn't compete with the A64's. OEM's couldn't ignore them anymore.
The chipset issue had largely been resolved with Nvidia, but I still don't like Nividia chipsets based on my experience.
Unfortunately, once more OEMs started paying attention to them, well, the channel suffered since AMD didn't have the capacity to supply both big OEMs AND the channel.
That's where capacity really beat them.
Bottom line: could Intel have had a hand in things? Quite possibly. I think there are a lot of other factors that contributed to it that made business sense for the OEMs at the time.
FWIW, I remember when the Athlon was ahead, there were local shops that were pimping AMD and completely ignored Intel. One shop tried to talk me out of a P3 but I said unless he could give me something that wasn't Via for a motherboard, I wasn't interested. :D Interestingly enough, the other AMD exclusive shop isn't in business anymore either. I believe they went down the tubes when AMD started favoring OEMs over the channel.
Intel unfairly squashed competition by bribing companies to dump on AMD products. That is unfair to AMD AND consumers both. It is illegal to use those methods to in the EU and the US so Intel deserved to be hit hard.
I find it interesting that everyone still bags on Intel for mucking with competetion yet completely ignores all the money that AMD got from Germany in either subsidies or low cost loans and no one's cried foul on that. There's a reason AMD has fabs in Dresden and it's not for the climate. :)
And of course this all came at a time when AMD was profitable too. Must be nice to get free and cheap money.
Guess AMD already had its government bailout, eh?
Intel can price their products however high they like, as long as the competitor doesn't have anything to match them. This isn't "theft" and there isn't anything wrong with that. I was saying that Intel may price i5 higher than they originally intended if they have to pay this fine. And AMD (to my knowledge) have nothing to compete against i5.
Ok idiots who think AMD shouldn't have bought ATI.
WHAT ABOUT FUSION YOU COMPLETE RETARDS.
Are you even aware that intel are 6 months away from fusing cpu and gpu on the same chip? Do you realise what that would have meant for AMD if they didn't have gpu tech?
Do you? Or are you just finally beginning to get it now?
AMD HAD TO BUY ATI, THEY HAD NO CHOICE.
I doubt developing GPU tech like Intel would cost them 5 billion.