Slashdot Mirror
Intel Settles NY Antitrust Case
clustermonkey writes "Intel Corporation and the New York Attorney General have agreed to terminate the lawsuit alleging violation of U.S. and state antitrust laws that was filed by the New York Attorney General in November 2009. Intel did not have to admit any violation of law (if there ever was any) nor did it have to admit or deny that the allegations in the complaint are true. Most importantly, the settlement does not require any changes to how the company does business. The settlement includes a $6.5 million payment that is "intended only to cover some of the costs incurred by the New York Attorney General in the litigation." Here's the full settlement, and Intel's official press release."
Its actually quite simple, Intel got away with rigging the markets. First they bribed the OEMs to take the P4 and kill the Athlon which is why when the Athlon was stomping the P4 you couldn't find hardly a single Athlon but you could find Duron/Sempron because part of their bribes were based on how many you sold of the competitor's chips and they were given a higher quota of the weak chips. Now how anybody, when one of the former CEOs called Intel kickbacks "like cocaine' and during the MHz wars there were several quarters that dell wouldn't have shown a profit without Intel kickbacks, how anybody can say they shouldn't get busted for that is beyond me, this is even worse than what MSFT was doing with the OEMs.
Secondly to this very day you can take a Via CPU (the only chip that lets you change CPUID) and any of the major benchmarks, change the CPUID to Intel and watch the chip score 30% or higher than the exact same CPU which is because Intel rigs their compiler. this is also well known and documented and goes back years, for those that haven't read it here is a link to get you started. BTW note that even though they were supposed to remove the "cripple AMD" function instead all they did was documented it, and certainly not in any easy way to find, at least not on the compiler website last i checked. To compare this would be like rigging Windows so that when FOSS code is run it hangs and drags down the FOSS programs to make them inferior to MSFT's own programs. this is still affecting reviews to this day such as this quote I remember from a review of netbooks "The benchmarks we ran all say the Atom 525 beats the E350 by a very large margin but for some reason the real world tests don't seem to bare this out" sorry i can't remember offhand where, i believe netbookreviews was the name of the blog.
Both of these frankly should have gotten Intel seriously busted for antitrust but instead they were able to slip a check for 1.25 billion to AMD, which frankly was far less than they made by crippling their competitor and forcing AMD to sell its fabs just to stay afloat, and all the problems at least in the US went bye bye just like TFA. I was someone that bought Intel exclusively since the 386Dx but i also believe in having a fair market and I simply can't support outright market rigging of this level. Frankly Intel should have been busted just like MSFT and been watched like a hawk for a decade to make sure they couldn't pull this kind of crap. i only hope the EU busts the hell out of them because its obvious in this "corporation yay!" climate we have in the government now there is no way Intel has to worry about the USA saying anything, no matter what they do. hell if the MSFT antitrust came up in today's climate not only would they not have been busted, they probably would have been rewarded with more tax breaks!
You'd think with one party supposedly championing the free market as the solution to everything they'd care about someone subverting it but i guess the only free market they care about is the one where they can sell their services to the highest bidder.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As Henri Lacordaire said "Entre le fort et le faible, entre le riche et le pauvre, entre le maître et le serviteur, c'est la liberté qui opprime et la loi qui affranchit." Google translates this into "Between the high and low, between rich and poor, between master and servant, it is freedom which oppresses and the law that liberates."