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

Hopefully this will free up Nvidia to compete

[Apple Acolyte]

Hopefully this will free up Nvidia to continue innovating in the integrated GPU arena. Intel's best attempt at competing against the year-old 9400M apparently only matches half of its performance at best. And wasn't Intel actively preventing Nvidia from competing for inclusion in the newest motherboard designs by failing to license certain Core iX chipset components?

Re:Intel

[MBGMorden]

The thing is they DIDN'T out compete the rest of the market. Intel did many of the same things as Microsoft - ie, strong arming their customers (large corporate customers not individuals) to "encourage" them to sell ONLY Intel chips. Intel may have the edge in performance now but their entire Pentium 4 line was horrendous compared to AMD's offerings (and costed MORE). They still went into almost all computers though because Intel wouldn't let most companies offer AMD chips as an alternative.

Now they've managed to leap-frog back into the performance lead (they're still more expensive overall), but that doesn't mean that they outcompeted anything. Heck I'm fairly certain that had Intel not behaved as they did AMD's increased profits would have manifested into more R&D investment and AMD might would still be in front for performance.