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US FTC Sues Intel For Anti-Competitive Practices

Posted by timothy on from the in-the-interim-please-use-the-ftc-compiler dept.

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."

6 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I especially like.. by InsaneProcessor · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
  2. Hopefully this will free up Nvidia to compete by Apple+Acolyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

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    Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
  3. Re:EU I can understand... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. AMD was robbed by byteherder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:AMD was robbed by byteherder · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. Re:I especially like.. by InsaneProcessor · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.