AMD Takes Case To Public, Japan

Kez writes "Following on from Tuesday's post on AMD filing a lawsuit against Intel in the U.S., Reuters is reporting that AMD is claiming damages against Intel K.K. in Japan, over the Japan Fair Trade Commission's recommendation that Intel has violated Japan's Antimonopoloy Act. They are seeking to claim $50million in damages in the High Court and have also filed for damages in the District Court. AMD continue to throw the punches, but will they come out on top?" At the same time, Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that Advanced Micro Devices yesterday ran a full-page advertisement in several major North American newspapers urging readers to familiarize themselves with its 48-page complaint against Intel Corp's alleged anti-competitiveness. By taking its case to the people in this way, AMD arguably may pique investor interest and raise its market profile. At the same time, these antics may however lead AMD into a precarious legal position."

Comments

Re:Down with Intel

[Neil Watson]

We need both AMD and Intel in order for innovation and lower prices to remain. If AMD destroys Intel we'll just trade one alleged monopoly for another.

Re:My question...

[dafz1]

It's a publicity stunt. The straw that broke the camel's back was the Apple/Intel annoucement. Conventional wisdom was if either Intel or AMD was going to have chips in Macs, it would be AMD for many reason(64-bit chips, collaboration on HyperTransport, image of the most powerful CPUs, etc). Since AMD got shut out of that, they had enough, and are claiming monopoly(if the Dept. of Justice can't get M$, how are they going to get Intel?).

Based on the allegations, this is how the Intel/Apple negotiations went.

Intel: Steve, I hear you keep a build of OS X on x86.

Jobs: Yeah, why?

Intel: We want you to switch to Pentium 4 processors.

Jobs: We're not interested. We're sticking with the PowerPC.

Intel: IBM made you look like an idiot, with your 3GHz by 2004 prediction.

Jobs: They gave us a roadmap, they just have been a little busy making chips for game consoles.

Intel: Wouldn't you like to finally break away from "The MegaHertz Myth"?

Jobs: We've done a good job dispelling that myth.

Intel(losing patience): Steve, we want you to change to our processors.

Jobs: N...

Intel rep opens a brief case, full of $100 bills, with a P4 chip sitting on top of the bills.

Intel: You will switch to the P4.

A couple thoughts

[suitepotato]

First, the Apple card is irrellevant. That is more a function of Jobs continuing to limit what is a pretty easily portable OS to ONE architecture and I don't mean the CPU, I mean the motherboard and BIOS. If Jobs would finally get it through his head that Microsoft continuously kick's Apple's arse for, among other reasons, the fact that Apple refuses to position themselves as a software/OS company and tries to straddle the line, which Microsoft has carefully tried to avoid doing since forever. OSX is a good product and it is that which should be driving them. They'd go a lot farther if they went over to the PC hardware side with it. Imagine OSX on a quad 64 bit dual core Opteron SMP board. You can do it with Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. Not OSX because Jobs can never admit he has ever been short of perfectly omnisciently right.

Second, AMD is in no danger of having a sizeable portion of their market taken by Intel and instead AMD has been making inroads into Intel's area with server class CPU offerings and the mobo makers have been making boards for them right along. For instance, that quad 64 bit dual core Opteron SMP board I mentioned above. I'd gladly buy one of these... if I won the lottery.

Third, yes, Intel should NOT be strong-arming anyone and they deserve to be rebuked by the courts for it, but it should be a criminal anti-trust slap and not a civil court slap as it looks more like vindictiveness and victimhood whinyness. "Look at us at AMD not getting enough of Intel's market because Intel is daring to defend themselves through unfair practices! Someone punish Intel for us so we can eat more of the market share!" Yes, I know that this administration isn't likely to do it, and a liberal Democrat administration would do it for politics sake so there's no real morally neutral enforcing the law angle there, sadly. Ideally, we'd need a business-friendly Republican administration to say, "okay, this is just wrong and you need to be called on the carpet for it." I ain't holding my breath so I guess civil court is the only recourse, again, sadly.

AMD already has the paranoid (and hypocritical) anti-corporate geek brigades behind it and has for a long time now. FUD based nonsense hate of Intel for ruling the market of a chipset they pioneered in the first place? Perfectly acceptable. Love of AMD despite them being also a big company? Perfectly acceptable. (Reminds me of the Google thing despite their lack of Linux support) I take all this with a grain of salt. On the merits, I find just the tactics bother me, not that they are actually trying to defend their market share. If AMD had pull themselves, I have ZERO doubt they'd do it themselves.

I'd be happiest if both of them combined all their instruction sets and promulgated a new baseline X86 instruction set. If NEC, Motorola, etc all made compatible chips and the mobo makers made boards for them, it would be better for the consumers' bottom line. Adhering to standards though would be the single most important thing so as not to fark the users and cause all sorts of unavoidable code forking. I don't need sixteen different Windows and Linux builds per type of either, ie, I don't need sixteen different FC4 builds due to processor differences...