Intel and AMD Settle Antitrust, Patent Lawsuits

Kohenkatz writes "Intel has agreed to pay $1.25 billion to AMD. In return, AMD will drop its lawsuits about patent and antitrust complaints. The two companies released this joint statement: 'While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.' The press release also says, 'Under terms of the agreement, AMD and Intel obtain patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement,' and that 'Intel and AMD will give up any claims of breach from the previous license agreement.'"

Comments

What AMD needs to do - and quickly

[haruchai]

is to get its shit together Fab-wise. They've been leading Intel for nearly 10 years in developing or deploying new tech and architecture
but Chipzilla has always been able to keep abreast because of their fabrication prowess.

Now that Intel's Nehalem architecture has all of the elements that AMD has been delivering with the Athlon and its descendants,
they're back to being the budget brand.

Re:Only $1.25 Billion?

[Interoperable]

Possibly; however, if it ever came down to an all-out litigious patent war, AMD may well have come out on top thanks to holding the rights to the x86-64 instruction set. It's not clear that AMD gets any real benefit other than getting to put the whole dispute behind them. I suspect that the real advantage that AMD gets out of this is the admission from Intel that they were engaging in illegal business practices. Intel has agreed to stop blocking AMD from OEM sales and will probably honor it considering that they've just admitted to bad behavior.

It looks to me like AMD thinks that they can compete based on their products despite the disadvantage that Intel has put them in through illegal means. I just hope that it means we get to see some chips from AMD that once again provide a much better performance/cost ratio than the Intel chips.

Re:DOJ?

[Attila Dimedici]

I don't understand US law but if intel have done something worthy of an antitrust suit isn't it down to the DOJ to go after them?
Or was this some sort of civil antitrust suit?

The answers to your questions are in order: Yes and Yes.
If the DOJ thinks that Intel has done something worthy of an antitrust suit they can go after them (and the DOJ has been investigating Intel, so they still may). However, a non government entity can also bring an antitrust suit (although they have to demonstrate that they are in some way directly impacted by this behavior).