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."

Comments

Re:I especially like..

[InsaneProcessor]

The compiler identified the CPU and changed it's behavior to be unoptimized if not the "golden" part. This falsely caused publicly used benchmarks to show competitors parts to be slower.

Re:I especially like..

[InsaneProcessor]

Let's break it down. For instructions sets like SSSE3, SSE4, etc. Intel designed bits to identify if these instructions are supported. All competitors comply with these bits. What they did do is: if the part isn't identified as "Genuine INTEL" the compiler stopped code optimizations. This is a provable fact.