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New York Launches Intel Antitrust Investigation
Multiple users have notified us of reports that the Attorney General of New York has initiated an antitrust investigation of Intel. The EU served Intel with similar charges last July, and AMD has been battling Intel over antitrust issues for some time. Quoting the New York Times:
"The subpoenas from Mr. Cuomo's office will seek internal memos, billing documents, and correspondence between Intel and its customers to determine whether the company engaged in a variety of anticompetitive practices, like penalized customers, primarily computer manufacturers, for purchasing processors from competitors or improperly paying customers to use Intel chips exclusively. Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel, said the company would comply with Mr. Cuomo's subpoena but denied any illegality."
Intel pay a company to use Intel exclusively, but Blu-Ray or HD-DVD can?
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"improperly paying customers to use Intel chips exclusively"
Yeah, like, don't get caught, idiots.
Andrew Cuomo is infringing on Elliot Spitzer's patented method of going after any big "bad" company (conveniently based OUTSIDE of New York to not rile up local interests) in order to get political credentials as "crusading for the people" while doing nothing to actually help anybody. Oh, and the planned Fab that AMD was going to build in New York (but is probably not going to because its market capitalization is less than the value of a new fab post-Barcelona) has absolutely nothing to do with his "heroic" interests in going after Intel.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
there stock over the last 2 years has been declining steadily, where as Intel has been increasing steadily. his is based on percentage numbers, not stock prices.(Intel is around 22 and AMD is around 6)
No AMD had a very sharp clime, but they have had fab issue and a couple of issues meeting expectation they set.
It looks like Intel is just doing better with fabs then AMD, and AMD doesn't have a plan they, or investors, are confident in. Meanwhile Intel just keeps chugging away.
I haven't heard anybody talk about anything in the industry that implies Intel is guilty of Anti-trust. While the people I know in the industry are few(couple dozen), they are scattered throughout different 'levels' . I.E. Fab workers to executives.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Intel was no more than architect of the PC revolution than IBM or Microsoft. That title belongs to MOS. MOS because they sold a right cheap CPU, and Apple because they put together the first real consumer-friendly multipurpose computers; the Apple II and the Commodore PET. Oh yes, and let's not forget VisiCalc, which probably can be credited as much as anything with sparking the PC revolution because a) it was a pretty damned innovative idea and b) it was an instant hit with small businesses, and created the core market for the PC revolution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Do a search on "Fishkill AMD". Enough said.
Grrr... fucked that up. What I meant was:
Intel was no more than architect of the PC revolution than IBM or Microsoft. That title belongs to MOS. MOS because they sold a right cheap CPU, and Apple and Commodore because they put together the first real consumer-friendly multipurpose computers; the Apple II and the Commodore PET. Oh yes, and let's not forget VisiCalc, which probably can be credited as much as anything with sparking the PC revolution because a) it was a pretty damned innovative idea and b) it was an instant hit with small businesses, and created the core market for the PC revolution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The thing is it CAN be argued that Intel uses predatory measures. If they pay people like Microsoft does to carry only their product then they are using predatory measures.
Tell that to MIPS, Motorola, Zilog, MOS, Digital, Cyrix, Rockwell....
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Yes, Intel has a long history of anticompetitive behaviour. I've read other posts basically saying "...AMD has created their own problems" but what people seem to forget is the incredibly capital intensive (and long term) nature of the processor business. When AMD had a real performance lead with the Athlon, Intel used their monopoply position to keep them from selling to as many OEMS as they might have. This likely depressed the prices and reduced capital that could have been used to build for the future.
I once worked at a now defunct major PC maker in the late 80s/early 90s.
They developed a notebook computer. There were 2 flavors: one used an Intel low-power 386 chip, and the other an AMD low-power 286. (They were going to use an Intel low-power 286, but Intel canceled the chip.)
The next month, they got shorted their allotment of 486 chips. Which meant that they couldn't ship all the desktop computers they'd built. There was no 2nd source for 486 chips. I was told that Intel was very clear why this happened. I think the AMD version was soon discontinued.
Not long after, Intel was investigated for this sort of thing. When the authorities contacted this company, they were so afraid of Intel that they denied anything like this had happened to them.
Creating an artificially sustained monopoly, by carefully funneling American taxpayer (and government approved via massive 401(k) influx) monies into their respective satellite businesses, was always the goal. In the mid to late nineties, and even beginning in the early 90s, there was a massive technology war, fought with funding, between Motorola/DEC/HP/Sun/Apple and friends vs. Intel/MS/IBM/AT&T and friends, with companies like Commodore/Amiga trying to stay on the fringes and wait the whole thing out while doing their own thing. The social networking graph (loosely based on executive board affiliations) probably goes deep into telecom and includes companies like TW, Comcast, MCI, and Sprint (not to mention Enron by way of investment portfolio) hedging bets on various angles of the board. Guess who had more political pull? The largest of the big business good old boys. Guess who lost out? Those who didn't have the same political clout.
So why the lawsuits now? It all seems so much like a complete and utter farce. "Oh, we didn't _know_ that's what you were going to do with all of the business advantage that those multibillion dollar government contracts gave you, so now we're going to at least take the token steps of at least filing the lawsuit... after we've screwed over the American population and half the world, and the
What a crock of shit.
(posted anonymously because the moderator cabal still keeps me at -1)
-HiLJ
--
I'm of course interested in breaking up the vast majority of monopolies.
Why is a state (as opposed to a Federal unit) spending it's money on anti-trust discovery?
It would appear to me that New York, and every other state in the Union, has more pressing issues on which to spend taxpayer money.
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Fishkill is IBM. NY basically build a nano-tech research fab for IBM in Albany, and its massive state government spends hundreds of millions on various IBM kit.
The AMD plant that NY state is spending $1.5 billion preparing for, although AMD has not committed to it, would be in Malta, NY, which is about 30 minutes North of Albany.
Like Pepsi/Coke do for your local fast food restaurant?
This is what happens when you have a rabidly anti-regulation administration in power at the federal level; the states have to take over some of those duties.
The other popular consumer-friendly multipurpose computer of that period was the Radio Shack TRS-80, which ran on a Zilog chip, an improvement of an Intel design. However, these were not the first home computers. The success of the Altair and Imsai computers with Intel chips showed that the idea could actually work. (Back then, the bar for personal computing was a bit higher than now; I read a review that praised a kit for being easy to assemble, on the grounds that the reviewer only had to dig out his oscilloscope once.)
Since Intel invented the microcomputer chip, and Intel chips were in two of the computers that kicked off the whole movement, it would seem reasonable to give Intel a good deal of the credit.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
- At its heart, the semiconductor business is a manufacturing business. In many ways, a company's ability to manufacture the chips is more important than the features of the chip itself. When the larger OEMs announce that they will require 10 million units in the next quarter with DPM of less than 500, there are only a few companies that can meet that kind of demand. Intel has spent tens of billions of dollars to build their manufacturing capabilities and keep them at the leading edge. AMD, on the other hand, has made a series of strategic blunders in this regard over the past 15 years (remember the UMC debacle?). As a result, AMD's has never been able to produce the quantity and quality of product that the larger OEMs demand, and have shut themselves out of the bigger markets. You can't blame Intel for this.
- When the OEMs design products, there is a lot more involved than just picking the CPU. They need to build a whole platform, and problems anywhere in that supply chain will directly impact the OEMs ability to produce and sell that platform. So even if AMD had been able to supply the 10 million Athlon CPUs with the required defect rate to an OEM, would the OEM be able to get enough chipset components within the required defect rate as well? Once again, Intel took charge of its own destiny here as well by designing and making their own chipsets that are backed by the same manufacturing capabilities as their CPUs, and OEMs respond by using the Intel-branded chipsets 90% of the time.
- The supply of the product is one thing, but the quality is another. I'm not talking about the chip's performance, but functional bugs that cause stability issues or data corruption. Slashdot likes to joke about the Pentium FDIV bug, but the truth is that bug scared the crap out of Intel, so they throw enormous resources into their CPU and chipset validation. This translates to direct value to the OEMs in the form of faster time-to-market and lower support costs. If OEMs perceive that on company is validating their products more than the competition, they are going to be more likely to chose that company's design. Remember, this goes for any component of the platform (not just the CPU!), so a flaky northbridge from VIA or NVidia could cause an OEM to drop the AMD platform in favor of Intel as well.
In other words, even though AMD had a superior performance in the Athlon, there were other completely competitive reasons for an OEM to select Intel over AMD, and most of those are a direct result of choices that AMD made."The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
I am somewhat shocked that most Slashdot posters are actually defending Intel's business practices. Especially in light of the recent OLPC news. The two stories are related. In one case Intel wants to maintain its monopoly in the industrialized world, and in the other, it wants to block competition - of a non-profit group - in the developing world.
Intel's behavior is a textbook case of abuse of monopoly. And, yes, 90% of revenue and 75% of unit sales of a market is a monopoly.
Intel's "incentive" program effectively blocked AMD from getting the revenue from their superior Athlon chips in order to build the billion dollar fabs necessary to compete. Why buy 25% of your chips from AMD when Intel will basically give you the same number of chips for free via loyalty incentives if you buy the other 75% of your chips from them as well? Intel knows that it must keep AMD's processor prices to an average price of less than $65 each (wholesale) so that AMD will have poor margins and will be perpetually unable to compete. And without fair competition it means CPU prices will once again rise and development progress will slow down.
But luckily for the consumer this will soon change. Japan, EU, Korea and now New York state is wise to Intel's business practices.
Even by your own description, this is not entirely a result of choices AMD made. Part of the challenge is building your capacity so you can supply what OEMs need as you describe. But you have to have enough capital to do this - the variations in profit that could have been produced by the anti-competitive practices may have prevented AMD from building up the capital. Yes it's not a sure thing that they would have done it, but it does mean that these practices are worth investigating
When the larger OEMs announce that they will require 10 million units in the next quarter with DPM of less than 500, there are only a few companies that can meet that kind of demand.
For this point to be valid it must be prohibitively expensive to launch a new product line totalling to say 1M units (something AMD definitely can ship).
Considering that smaller OEMs do exist (10M is what the largest sell worldwide, right?), I believe this to be false. I'd like to see the numbers though.
$10/unit must be OK for not putting all the eggs in one basket. IANAOEM.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
It seems cheezedawg's arguments still stand well. Asserting any kind of leveraging is anti-competitive works if you make a single act or event from Intel and the OEM's as the cause for all of AMD's problems. I can't buy that. The argument that a series of decisions made over changing business conditions got Intel to where they are now is valid. To Intel's credit, they understood danger and responded to it. Just as importantly they understood their unique advantages as a company to extend their market power. No one can deny Intel's immense manufacturing power. Their business partners understand all the implications of that (I'm sure Intel constantly reminds them also). Having a flexible and CONSISTENT supplier is what businesses dream of. Putting aside conspiracies and fanboism, I have to take everything at face value. What I see in Intel is a company that's run pretty damn well and I would want some of those guys working at my company. Jeez, I have to stop slathering over Intel right now.
At the risk if being off-topic, can anyone explain how Intel is culpable for any of the numerous missteps AMD has made dating back to the acquisition of ATI in 2006?
you is wrong
Yes.
Ley was not a scapegoat. Other people were scapegoats for HIM but we finally got to him as well.
They developed a notebook computer. There were 2 flavors: one used an Intel low-power 386 chip, and the other an AMD low-power 286.
Notebook? I think they were too big to be that, are you sure you don't mean suitcase computer?
Now might be a good time to purchase stock in paper-shredding companies.
Is anyone aware of the fact that monopolies are ILLEGAL in the United States?
You do realize that Intel gained a lot of its manufacturing capability through questionable avenues, such as suing smaller silicon vendors then out-spending their law teams and refusing any solution other than to hand over their silicon plants, right? (eg DEC)
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.