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US FTC Sues Intel For Anti-Competitive Practices
Vigile writes "And here Intel was about to get out of 2009 with only a modestly embarrassing year. While Intel and AMD settled their own antitrust and patent lawsuits in November, the FTC didn't think that was good enough and has decided to sue Intel for anti-competitive practices. While the suits in Europe and in the US civil courts have hurt Intel's pocketbook and its reputation, the FTC lawsuit could very likely be the most damaging towards the company's ability to practice business as they see fit. The official hearing is set for September of 2010 but we will likely hear news filtering out about the evidence and charges well before that. One interesting charge that has already arisen: that Intel systematically changed its widely-used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors."
You are such a liar. They did not break any law. Find me any law dictating compiler design. Please.
These regulations are up for interpretation by whoever is in power at the time. Right now we have European style socialists in power, so they're choosing to interpret the regulations in their favor.
As for your laughable argument about the compiler, do you think any company is going to release a compiler and optimizations for their competitor? You do understand, unlike most of these facile idiots, that Intel would need to test the compiler on AMD products, right? Seriously - what kind of buffoon thinks Intel can just optimize for their own processors and just say "Well, we'll hope it works on AMD chips too - here you go!". No. They would need to invest time and considerable resources.
Any "regulation" which requires that a company purchase, develop for, and spend time validating their product on a competitor's product is just laughable.
Are you fucking kidding me? Intel didn't just "not test" it with AMD's stuff, they went out of their way to make sure it wouldn't work on it. And if AMD's processors didn't run x86 code properly a whole lot more people would notice then just the ones using Intel's compilers. Do you even have any clue how a compiler works?
Wow, you don't know much about, well, anything do you? If Intel just released a compiler with optimizations that may or may not work on AMD there would be hell to pay. Intel would have to thoroughly validate their compiler against AMD products.
Who's the clueless one, again? "Durr, can't they just release a compiler with optimizations targetted for a processor without thoroughly validating that said optimizations work on said processor?". Jesus Christ dude, really? Are you that stupid? Supporting (yes, even enabling support for) AMD chips would have cost Intel time and money, and not inconsiderable amounts of either. No one in their right mind will dictate that Intel should spend money giving AMD a free fucking compiler.
What Intel did is sabotage.
What did Intel sabotage? Its own product?
Breakfast served all day!