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:Intel

[will3477]

You may not be using intel's compiler, but in the scientific community I knew people who wear by it and those same people spend a lot of money on hardware (adding hundreds of nodes to clusters annually).

Re:EU I can understand...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Have you considered the possibility that some legal actions are actually about upholding the law, rather than some sinister ulterior motive?

AMD was robbed

[byteherder]

Back when AMD's microprocessors were the state of the art (Athlon), they should have had 50% or more of the chip market. Intel only was able to preserve its market share through illegal means. Eventually, through the billions in extra profit they made, they were able to pull ahead in this technology race. AMD was deprived of billions is profit which they could have used for more R&D to make their chips more competitive today. I don't know how you restore a market where one player has been cheating illegally for a decade and now has a monolopy, but Good Luck FTC.

Re:AMD was robbed

[MobyDisk]

The reputation that AMD earned with the k5 and k6 was appropriate...Intel holding the lead during the time of the Athlon was as much Intels past ability to make a consistantly reliable product as it was any illegal practice.

The compatibility issues on those chips was fewer than the compatibility problems with Intel's own chips. But if there is a problem with an Intel chip, the compiler manufacturers work around it, and the OS vendors emulate the broken instruction or code around it. If AMD has a similar problem, there are press releases and everyone suddenly thinks "oh, I need Intel Inside (r)"

On the flip side, there was a period of a year or two where Intel's 440 motherboards were constantly experiencing compatibility problems. This was around the RDRAM era, which was another blight on Intel. But people continued to buy Intel during that period, even though AMD was winning in reliability AND performance AND price.

There were fishy things happening during that time. Big OEMs making press releases about switching to AMD, then signing-on with Intel for a few years more. Yeah, maybe they were bluffing to get a bargain. Or maybe Intel did back-door dealings with the decision makers.

Re:AMD was robbed

[byteherder]

Is there some speculation in my orginal post. Sure. But remember, this was era when AMD market share was rising very rapidly, >+1% per month. Would they have run out of manufacturing capacity at some point. Possibly. Could they have build more. Sure, if they had the money. But that is exacty the point. Intel made sure they would never get the market share to get the money needed to compete. Never.

Intel, at the time, had the market share, the fabs and the cash but what they didn't have is a superior product and wouldn't have more several years. If you are Intel what do your do? By any means necessary, your make sure your competitor does not get enough market share or money to threaten your monolopy. If you have the break a few laws in the process, so be it. Limit how much of your competitors chip the computer manufacturers will buy. Illegal but sure. Sell chips below cost. Why not.

Now they are being called to task for their past actions. Not by just the FTC but by Japan, South Korea, the EU. They just settled a lawsuit from AMD for $1.25 billion.

I am not saying that AMD is blameless for their current situation. They could have invested more heavily in fab technology. The purchase of ATI was possibly ill advised. They jury is still out on that one. They slipped up with the release of the Barcelona chip. All I am saying is that given a level playing field, things could have turned out much differently.

Re:I especially like..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are some differences(3Dnow! is AMD only, SSE isn't present on some AMD chips, and a whole bunch of other minutia).

Thing is, though, chips declare which features they support: "flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae..." and who made them "vendor_id: GenuineIntel/AuthenticAMD". Intel's compiler, though, was ignoring the feature flags if the vendor_id was not "GenuineIntel". It would be silly to demand that intel support 3Dnow! or any other AMD-specific oddities, or demand that it ensure that the binaries it produces are equally well optimized for the precise architectural details of AMD's CPUs.

Blatantly ignoring the feature flags on non-intel CPUs, though, is another matter.

Read the FTC release

[RalphBNumbers]

The FTC press release says:

"To remedy the anticompetitive damage alleged in the complaint, the FTC is seeking an order which includes provisions that would prevent Intel from using threats, bundled prices, or other offers to encourage exclusive deals, hamper competition, or unfairly manipulate the prices of its CPU or GPU chips

That sounds like a pretty direct strike against Intel's moves in the graphics market lately. Selling an Atom alone for more than the price of the same Atom bundled with a chipset, trying to prevent Nvidia from making chipsets for their Nehalem CPUs, bundling their own GPU on the package of all of their low to mid range next generation CPUs, etc...

It should be interesting to see how Intel responds to this. It's probably too late to make any major changes to Clarkdale/Arrandale before they ship, so on-package GPUs are definitely coming. But imagine if Intel were required to sell bare dice at fair prices (surprisingly enough, packaging a die is one of the most expensive steps of chipmaking), so that others could do the same thing. Imagine an intel chip with an on-package Nvidia or AMD GPU...

Sometimes I wonder if computers will always be built around motherboards as we know them. As motherboards shrink, and we start seeing multiple dice on a single package even in low end consumer gear, could the motherboard eventually be replaced with one big multi-die package? It would certainly reduce size and bring part counts down, and I expect it would allow for lower power consumption and higher speeds as well (although, of course, it would make building your own as an enthusiast impractical).

Re:I especially like..

[EndlessNameless]

//Is there? No seriously, is there?//

Yes, there is quite a difference between not optimizing for your competitor's product and deliberately degrading performance for your competitor's product.

In the former case, there is no additional effort involved; there is a simple decision not to expend resources where they will not provide a return on the investment.

In the latter case, there is a deliberate effort to expend resources with the intention of harming your competitor. And while anti-competitive behaviour may be an unfortunate norm in American business, it is also an illegal behaviour for a company in a monopoly position.

Having hopefully clarified your sloppy manner of thinking (lest others accept it), we can agree your question was deliberately inflammatory and move on.