Federal Trade Commission Files Suit Against Intel For 'Anticompetitive Tactics'

[bradl]

You know, that's total BS. Sorry that AMD can't put out a chip that's worth a toss. How is that Intel's fault? What, do we file suit against Coke because Pepsi and RC can't hang?

It's called competition people, wake up. Maybe the fact that Intel is kicking AMDs ass should be enough to motivate them to bring on some new talent and start getting serious about chip design.

I think it sucks that every time a company does a great job of putting out a superior product, they're punished for it. What's the motivation to be a leader when you are punished for it? Maybe we should all come out with mediocre goods and services from now on and see how far we get.

And the whole lot of you miss the entire point.

This isn't an AMD vs. Intel fanboi war as you all are making it out to be. If you RTFM, you'll see that it is about Intel giving rewards (or punishment) to desktop and server manufacturers for using their CPUs. Choice or not, you leave that incentivisation to the CUSTOMER, not another company that makes the choice for you. That is antitrust, and is a clear violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act:

The law attempts to prevent the artificial raising of prices by restriction of trade or supply.[5] In other words, innocent monopoly, or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve his status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. Put another way, it has sometimes been said that the purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors, but rather to protect competition and the competitive landscape.

This also violates a portion of the Clayton Antitrust Act as well. But I would call 'threats and rewards aimed at the world's largest manufacturers' a nefarious deal and a way to preserve their status. Just those saying 'Intel is the Best/AMD sucks/etc.' very well easily proves that.

BL.

 

[BlizzardBomb]

You know, that's total BS. Sorry that AMD can't put out a chip that's worth a toss. How is that Intel's fault? What, do we file suit against Coke because Pepsi and RC can't hang?

AMD actually has some decent processors and their close integration with ATI graphics cards does actually produce incredible results. The problem is Intel is restricting other companies from using AMDs processors, not that AMD processors are rubbish.

 

[iSee]

You would think the FTC would have more pressing issues to deal with right now. But I guess everyone knows the Intel name and the Feds probably think this is a positive PR move from them right now.

Well, it's the FTC's job to prevent anti-competitive business practices... I'm not sure what else you think they should be doing...

 

[Corrosive vinyl]

This is good news. I have been a great fan of AMD and have used their chips in the PCs which i used to build before my mac change-over. They have good quality products which can be tinkered with much more then Intel (if I remember right). Hopefully it will mean that when going to the store looking for an AMD run computer, it won't be like searching for Waldo, especially since we are considering getting another PC thanks to the final abandonment of Windows Vista.

 

[Bitjockey]

"In addition, allegedly, Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, in a way that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors' CPU chips. Intel told its customers and the public that software performed better on Intel CPUs than on competitors' CPUs, but the company deceived them by failing to disclose that these differences were due largely or entirely to Intel's compiler design."

Er...could someone also clarify this a bit? Unless, everyone uses an intel compilers this doesn't make sense.

I'd like to know more about this too. As I recall the chip makers all have to use the same compiler code or Windows won't work properly. The X86 code was written by Intel for their chips and was/is their property. When AMD came along they somehow finagled the rights to use it, but may not have any input as to how it's written. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong

 

[bradl]

Intel is the best and they are going to stay on top. This is how those corporate big boys do their thing. And it is disgusting. Now, someone mentioned AMD. Ok, AMD uses Intel's intellectual property but were told by intel not to compete with them in certain markets and at certain prices.
Look, intel is the goto chips maker on this planet. Have you ever read up on chip design and manufacturing? Man the amount of educated geeks and money needed to to pursue that game is in the billions!
Well, here we go again.Yall better drop their stock and quick.

It's plain to see that you haven't read those very specs you mention. IF you had ever read the x86-64 specs (which I doubt), you'd notice that they were written by....

AMD!

Yes! Intel is using the entire x86-64 specification that was written entirely by developers at AMD. So this claim rather fails.

BL.

 

[macrumorsMaster]

I wonder how long till the FTC comes after Apple for bundling their OS with their hardware (just like the EU did to MS with IE)

 

[Shodan]

You know, that's total BS. Sorry that AMD can't put out a chip that's worth a toss. How is that Intel's fault? What, do we file suit against Coke because Pepsi and RC can't hang?

AMD dominate the lower tier CPU market due to the value of their chipsets and fantastic CPU's.

Infact, their CPU's day-to-day performance and 3D are JUST as good as Intel's top end whilst costing around 40% less.

Were you saying the same during the P4 days?

Intel make rubbish integrated graphics, they monopolize the market with shocking prices AND they bully other companies.

It's time for them to eat their chips. (No Pun intended)

 

[TennisandMusic]

This is lame. How does Intel have a monopoly on anything? AMD makes competing chips. So how can they leverage a monopoly in one segment, to do better in another?

Go AMD if you don't want Intel.

Intel is the most popular, because when AMD was kicking Intel's butt, Intel decided to up the ante and proceeded to absolutely smoke AMD. No one wants to knowingly buy an inferior product.

Also, if Intel bundling products is anti competitive, what about Apple using it's locked down hardware (which is no different than what you can buy in a store) that they didn't engineer to FORCE people to buy their machines if you want OSX. Isn't that using a "monopoly" in one area (they are the sole proprietors of OSX), to enforce a monopoly in another (you can ONLY run OSX on Apple BRANDED hardware, they have no unique engineering in any of their computers)?

I find it hilarious some of the Apple fans here are saying it's "about time" we punished a brilliant and successful company. Who would you suggest is the better alternative?

 

[bradl]

This is lame. How does Intel have a monopoly on anything? AMD makes competing chips. So how can they leverage a monopoly in one segment, to do better in another?

Go AMD if you don't want Intel.

Intel is the most popular, because when AMD was kicking Intel's butt, Intel decided to up the ante and proceeded to absolutely smoke AMD. No one wants to knowingly buy an inferior product.

Also, if Intel bundling products is anti competitive, what about Apple using it's locked down hardware (which is no different than what you can buy in a store) that they didn't engineer to FORCE people to buy their machines if you want OSX. Isn't that using a "monopoly" in one area (they are the sole proprietors of OSX), to enforce a monopoly in another (you can ONLY run OSX on Apple BRANDED hardware, they have no unique engineering in any of their computers)?

I find it hilarious some of the Apple fans here are saying it's "about time" we punished a brilliant and successful company. Who would you suggest is the better alternative?

See the posts above about the rewards/deals they were making with Dell/HP/etc. This has nothing to do with the consumer, except that the consumer is left with less choice in the matter. Intel and AMD should be on equal competitive footing when dealing with Dell/HP/etc., and they are not, because of the threads and rewards Intel is giving them. That, plain and simple, is Antitrust.

Have a read in your history books about the Sherman Antitrust Act, and how it affected the Standard Oil Company (later BP/Amoco).

BL.

 

[TennisandMusic]

See the posts above about the rewards/deals they were making with Dell/HP/etc. This has nothing to do with the consumer, except that the consumer is left with less choice in the matter. Intel and AMD should be on equal competitive footing when dealing with Dell/HP/etc., and they are not, because of the threads and rewards Intel is giving them. That, plain and simple, is Antitrust.

Have a read in your history books about the Sherman Antitrust Act, and how it affected the Standard Oil Company (later BP/Amoco).

BL.

Hmm....less choice? So it's anti competitive to try and one up your competitor by offering a better deal to retailers than your competitor? Businesses should not be rewarded by other businesses for choosing to use their services?

No business should be required to use "equal footing" as a measure for anything. Competition is exactly what breeds further innovation and success (it's what caused Intel to be in the position they are in now!) and, believe it or not, business can be pretty cutthroat. Business, by it's very nature, will never be about "equal footing." Intel is not the only player in the game, and has not been for quite some time.

Oh no, Intel is offering incentives to buyers, heaven forbid! Ridiculous.

I know plenty about history, and there is no need to be condescending. I think the problem is that most people are in fact just idiots, and government is intruding where it should not. But then again, what's new...

 

[Swift]

Not clear what they want

I suppose it's this, for one thing: changes a chip compiler should probably be open-source. Getting the edge on another chip maker, when you're the market leader, and then making the competitor simply reverse-engineer the whole thing to just be able to co-exist, isn't fair. If you make an advance in the chip, great. But something else must be going on.

Don't have an opinion about this, yet. I'll have to wait for more info.

 

[bradl]

Hmm....less choice? So it's anti competitive to try and one up your competitor by offering a better deal to retailers than your competitor? Businesses should not be rewarded by other businesses for choosing to use their services?

Not even the retailers get it. You're still on the consumer side of things, and that's what you don't get. This is unfair competition between BUSINESSES, without the consumer even being involved, let alone aware of it.

An independent gas station owner has to stock back up on his supply of gas for his customers (one of those customers being you). He gets told from one supplier (Exxon-Mobil) "Buy it from us, and I'll reward you with a gift; refuse, and the next time, I'll charge you double or triple." Another supplier (Chevron) gives the gas station owner no such offer.

You, the consumer, are not involved, nor privy to any of this.

Antitrust.

No business should be required to use "equal footing" as a measure for anything. Competition is exactly what breeds further innovation and success (it's what caused Intel to be in the position they are in now!) and, believe it or not, business can be pretty cutthroat. Business, by it's very nature, will never be about "equal footing." Intel is not the only player in the game, and has not been for quite some time.

By what you're saying, you believe that this, and my anecdote above are perfectly legal. Both the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts disagree with you, and they have been on the lawbooks for over 100 years.

Oh no, Intel is offering incentives to buyers, heaven forbid! Ridiculous.

No. Intel is not offering incentives to buyers. They are threatening and giving rewards to manufacturers who MAKE the computers. You see nothing of that incentive, and everyone is blissfully, naively unaware of it.

I know plenty about history, and there is no need to be condescending. I think the problem is that most people are in fact just idiots, and government is intruding where it should not. But then again, what's new...

Then if you know it, why complain that this isn't right? You've just contradicted yourself. This was also said about Sherman in Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan:

"The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself."

In this case, in doing what they have done, Intel is destroying fair competition.

BL.

 

[nagromme]

I’d love to see the day when Apple has 2 or 3 really good, innovative, large-scale chip suppliers to choose from for Macs.

 

[OllyW]

Hmm....less choice? So it's anti competitive to try and one up your competitor by offering a better deal to retailers than your competitor? Businesses should not be rewarded by other businesses for choosing to use their services?

How is telling a customer that if they don't exclusively use Intel chips in every single one of their computers they won't trade with them at all, classed as offering a better deal?

 

[saturniphone]

And the whole lot of you miss the entire point.

This isn't an AMD vs. Intel fanboi war as you all are making it out to be. If you RTFM, you'll see that it is about Intel giving rewards (or punishment) to desktop and server manufacturers for using their CPUs. Choice or not, you leave that incentivisation to the CUSTOMER, not another company that makes the choice for you. That is antitrust, and is a clear violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act:



This also violates a portion of the Clayton Antitrust Act as well. But I would call 'threats and rewards aimed at the world's largest manufacturers' a nefarious deal and a way to preserve their status. Just those saying 'Intel is the Best/AMD sucks/etc.' very well easily proves that.

BL.

Hey no offense or anything, but your summarization of how antitrust laws work is incredibly superficial. There has probably been more critcism of the Sherman Antitrust Act than any other law not the least of which is that it does not have a clearly defined goal (i.e. - eradicating diseconomies of scale, promoting lowest prices, etc). It is a big jumbled mess that is somehow intended to protect the free market from becoming controlled -- by controlling it. Your notion of "incentivisation" has absolutely nothing at all to do with this. Almost every supplier in the world that offers discounts for bulk orders and incentives for exclusivity deals. The idea that we're discussing this on a Mac Forum which deals often with iPhones which involve BOTH of these types of situations (they get discounted rates on flash memory, camera components, etc AND have an exclusivity deal with AT&T) is exceedingly ironic.


I fully agree that antitrust laws have become a means by which companies are forced to "share the wealth". Intel chips are so much more vastly superior to AMD it's particularly egregious to me that this happens. Bottom line is the consumer will ALWAYS pay the price. You do not tax/fine corporations -- you tax/fine consumers.

 

[Vmaatta]

Exactly.

Nothing worse than a bunch of Mac users complaining that people are "forced" to use Windows.

And it's the same with CPUs. There is of course AMD. And then nobody is forced to use x86 compatible CPUs either. There are SPARC CPUs (two vendors), ARM CPUs (lots of vendors), PowerPC (two vendors) and so on.




Indeed. Government has certainly not tried to avoid buying computers with Intel chips. So why the surprise that Intel have the power?

It baffles me how completely ignorant some people are .

 

[Vmaatta]

You know, that's total BS. Sorry that AMD can't put out a chip that's worth a toss. How is that Intel's fault? What, do we file suit against Coke because Pepsi and RC can't hang?

It's called competition people, wake up. Maybe the fact that Intel is kicking AMDs ass should be enough to motivate them to bring on some new talent and start getting serious about chip design.

I think it sucks that every time a company does a great job of putting out a superior product, they're punished for it. What's the motivation to be a leader when you are punished for it? Maybe we should all come out with mediocre goods and services from now on and see how far we get.

This really has nothing to do with which company makes better products.

Intel is not being sued because "it's on top".

 

[cmaier]

I worked at AMD for 10 years in the california microprocessor division; I was one of the 18 folks who was responsible for the first Opteron/Athlon 64 and AMD64 (now x86-64, to most people).

AMD has sucked ever since I left (I left in Nov. 2006, the last time they made a profit , and I buy Intel chips nowadays, but I can assure you that back in the day, when Athlon 64 ate intel's chips for lunch, Intel was up to shenanigans. We had to discount our chips ridiculously to convince anyone to buy them and to give up the kickbacks they had been receiving from Intel.

We also saw tactics like Intel bribing software makers to put in code like:

if (chip==AMD) {run slow;}

 

[Eidorian]

I worked at AMD for 10 years in the california microprocessor division; I was one of the 18 folks who was responsible for the first Opteron/Athlon 64 and AMD64 (now x86-64, to most people).

AMD has sucked ever since I left (I left in Nov. 2006, the last time they made a profit , and I buy Intel chips nowadays, but I can assure you that back in the day, when Athlon 64 ate intel's chips for lunch, Intel was up to shenanigans. We had to discount our chips ridiculously to convince anyone to buy them and to give up the kickbacks they had been receiving from Intel.

We also saw tactics like Intel bribing software makers to put in code like:

if (chip==AMD) {run slow;}

I respect your experience but what about Athlon II and Phenom II?

 

[cmaier]

I respect your experience but what of Athlon II and Phenom II?

I left long before those. We had just finished the dual cores (x2's) when I left. I also don't actually know which chip is which by commercial name - we used completely different names internally (everything was a type of hammer - the first was sledgehammer. I actually came up with the code name because, when morale was low, we decided to help out the facilities guys by taking a sledgehammer to an internal wall that needed to come down to open up our R&D space. The name stuck. Before that, they were going to name the chips after bows and arrows, starting with "longbow" because the 64-bit extensions were "long."

By the time I was left, I could see that AMD had missed a design cycle and Intel was going to kick our ass.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

I worked at AMD for 10 years in the california microprocessor division; I was one of the 18 folks who was responsible for the first Opteron/Athlon 64 and AMD64 (now x86-64, to most people).

AMD has sucked ever since I left (I left in Nov. 2006, the last time they made a profit , and I buy Intel chips nowadays, but I can assure you that back in the day, when Athlon 64 ate intel's chips for lunch, Intel was up to shenanigans. We had to discount our chips ridiculously to convince anyone to buy them and to give up the kickbacks they had been receiving from Intel.

We also saw tactics like Intel bribing software makers to put in code like:

if (chip==AMD) {run slow;}

And that line of code stunt I believe is exactly some of the many example of the things intel does that is against the law.

I know I been out of the game for a while. When I built my computer 5 years ago I put in an Athon 3000+ and at the time it was kicking the ass of intel chips that cost 2-3 times as much. When I build its replacement I will against look at the market and see which one I choose. I read something that some of intels first x86-64 chips were clearly reversed engineered Athons. One engineer stated that when you broke the chip down you saw some pretty clear direct copies of the Athons in the intel chips.
Intel does a lot of illegal practice yet again the hammer needs to come down on them.

 

[bradl]

And that line of code stunt I believe is exactly some of the many example of the things intel does that is against the law.

I know I been out of the game for a while. When I built my computer 5 years ago I put in an Athon 3000+ and at the time it was kicking the ass of intel chips that cost 2-3 times as much. When I build its replacement I will against look at the market and see which one I choose.

Intel does a lot of illegal practice yet again the hammer needs to come down on them.

This is what I've done, and to be honest, cost-to-performance ratio is too big for Intel chips right now. I just moved my Athlon 64 X2 4000+ over to my Linux box, and replaced my that one with a Athlon II 250. It's more cost effective, especially with cost-to-performance, easy to overclock, and is more energy efficient than the Intel CPUs. But simply for me, it's price.

AMD is making a comeback, and is actually doing rather well. Intel still has the lead in some things, but their business practices are less than honourable (and this is coming from someone who lives less than 10 minutes drive from Intel's campus).

Last Intel CPU I used was in a Pentium 100 in an old Acer Aspire in 1995. Since then, it's been AMD for me. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

BL.

 

[cmaier]

And that line of code stunt I believe is exactly some of the many example of the things intel does that is against the law.

I know I been out of the game for a while. When I built my computer 5 years ago I put in an Athon 3000+ and at the time it was kicking the ass of intel chips that cost 2-3 times as much. When I build its replacement I will against look at the market and see which one I choose. I read something that some of intels first x86-64 chips were clearly reversed engineered Athons. One engineer stated that when you broke the chip down you saw some pretty clear direct copies of the Athons in the intel chips.
Intel does a lot of illegal practice yet again the hammer needs to come down on them.

I'm sure they reverse engineered, but those first Intel x86-64 chips were just 32-bit chips that simulated 64-bit with microcode (for example, to add two 64-bit numbers, use a 32-bit adder and some carry math). That's why they were so slow. Reverse engineering doesn't bother me (as long as patents aren't infringed). But paying skype to only allow N streams on an athlon 64 (which was capable of double what the Intel chip could do) while allowing N*10 streams on an Intel chip was kind of scummy, too.

 

[RazHyena]

But...but.....AMD sucks.

Oh well.