AMD Takes Microsoft's Side in Antitrust Case

Skjellifetti writes "CNet has an article that says that AMDs CEO is opposed to the MS antitrust remedy being persued by the states. " There's a lot of information packed fairly tightly in that article that I won't rehash here. Worth a read tho. Update: 04/16 18:01 GMT by M : Reuters has a story with more about Sanders' testimony today.

Comments

Who would have thunk it?

[RoshanCat]

Intel testifying against Microsoft, & AMD for Microsoft. Expect great favors from MS to AMD, even an XBox2 contract. Time to invest in AMD

OTOH, What a quandry for slashdotters!!! Will they boycott AMD for sleeping with the enemy, support Intel for going againt MS?

this line says it all...

[Em Emalb]

"Sanders said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates asked him to testify and that he agreed out of concern..."

Yep, concern for his company. MS would strong arm him most likely, and the last thing AMD needs is the lack of support from MS. I do not see this as a bad thing, hey, it's business, but rather underhanded of MS if it is the reason for AMD's support.

Intel

[NewbieSpaz]

Intel should join Transmeta(read:Linux) to oppose M$.

Oh, right, that'd never happen... Then again, who thought AMD would try to piss off us /.'ers by siding with M$.

This whole situation is just making my brain hurt. Think I'll take 2 aspirin and take a nap.

Boycot AMD!

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

My last 4 processors have been AMD ones and I was very happy with them.

Also I always thought AMD had a vital position as competitor to INTEL. Without AMD, Intel chips would be much more expensive and much worse.

Now we can see that to get decent AMD support in Microsoft products, AMD starts lying in public:
Instead of comparing Windows(no TM) to Linux(TM), they compare it to Solaris and OSX. Of course Windows is better for AMD then the two, but even better would be an open industry standard like linux, which is prevented by MS and which runs on every architecture. Also I don't see any connection to the modularisation of MSWindows.

Thinking about Intel, I recall the release of the intel compilers and other goodness for OSS. My next CPU will be an Intel.

Yours as well?

Strongest proof yet of MS' monopoly position

[swillden]

... not that it was in doubt, but this is amazing.

Sanders' contention is that having a single, standardized operating system gives hardware manufacturers a single, well-defined target to aim for when developing new versions of their processors.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense, if you are so steeped in the MS-dominated worldview that you think it makes sense for hardware manufacturers to be optimizing their devices to run specific software faster.

But, isn't that backwards? Doesn't it make more sense for software makers to optimize for the available hardware? I always thought so. But, then it never until just now occurred to me that AMD is not and never has been in the business of making Intel-compatible chips; they've always been in the business of making Microsoft-compatible chips, and the distinction is not a subtle one.

Is it possible that Sanders' view does make sense from an overall efficiency standpoint? Which is more complex, a microprocessor, plus accompanying chipsets, or an operating system? Both are horrendously complex beasts these days, but I think it's pretty clear that the software running on the processor is orders of magnitude more complex, and therefore harder. And it's reasonable to suggest that the simpler component should adapt itself to the more complex component, right? Maybe even more important, which component has the longest life? They're both pretty short, but I'd say a single software release tends to span processors more than the converse.

Food for thought, indeed.

My opinion is still that the consumer is best-served if competition between hardware and software platforms (and between different components of software platforms) can proceed independently. Operating systems should try to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms and should all compete amongst themselves. Hardware platforms should try to attract OS developers by being faster, more robust, cheaper, more scalable, etc. Similarly, OSes should compete for application developers.

But this also means that a great deal of effort will be expended on many sides trying to come to agreement on common APIs, rather than just getting on with the business of innovation. More variety also leads to more confusion on the part of consumers. This is an argument Microsoft has been making for a long time, albeit in a software-only context. There is some sense to it: Fixing one part of the equation makes the surrounding parts easier to optimize.

We all know which part of the equation Microsoft wants to hold constant, of course.