AMD Still Accusing Intel Of Dirty Tricks
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My goodness. How many years has it been since the dispute started between AMD and Intel. It seems like AMD has been claiming that Intel uses dirty tricks to maintain its business dominance, since both companies started back in the late 60’s. But is the world starting to take notice? It seems it may have. Countries around he world are taking a closer look at Intel and the alleged influence it places on other businesses.
In a San Jose Mercury News article it states that:
AMD claims its larger rival Intel has used under-the-table payments, threats and other “dirty tricks” to deter computer makers from buying AMD’s semiconductors. It says Intel, among other wrongdoings, offered a Tech Data executive a $1 million bribe, browbeat Acer into backing out of an AMD promotion and sold software that crashed computers running AMD chips.
The pages of AMD’s suit accuse Intel of so many acts of market intimidation they “read like a chapter from ‘The Godfather,’ ” according to Nathan Brookwood, a research fellow at the Saratoga market consulting firm Insight 64.
Intel insists it has done no more than provide legitimate incentives to use its products and that its business practices have helped keep computer costs low.
But has what Intel has done really caused AMD harm? In the article it also states:
Courts have differed on what constitutes anti-competitive behavior, according to legal experts interviewed by the Mercury News. But a company generally is considered to have abused its market dominance if its behavior hurts consumers, according to William Page, a senior associate dean at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.
That is a key issue of contention in the case of Intel.
Its executives claim chip prices have plunged 42 percent since 2000, hardly the sign of a market-monopolizing bully.
AMD executives acknowledge that prices have dropped in terms of “per unit of microprocessor performance,” the amount of data processed in a given period of time. Because of technological improvements, chips can do more faster than ever before.
But AMD executives say the price of individual chips hasn’t changed much, aside from dropping after the tech bubble burst about 2001 and after AMD sued Intel in 2005.
So what do you think? Is AMD right? Does Intel cheat?
Comments welcome.
2 Comments
Jerry
August 6th, 2008
at 5:04am
The only issue here is to keep AMD alive so that Intel will not return to its former monopolistic practices. Intel has been guilty of very aggressive corporate greed for most of its life, and the only thing that restrains that now is the necessity of competing with AMD. This amazing cachet that attaches to the name Intel is a very strange illusion that has been carefully and artfully promoted over the years, and it still persists. People continue to see this false glitter emanating from the name Intel, but the truth is, no one can see any difference, when running a computer graphics program or a word processor, between an AMD CPU and an Intel CPU. Only obsessed geeks (I use the term as a compliment) can find any difference between them, and then only in the margins of highly technical test results. In a blind test running ordinary software, no one would be able to detect any difference between the two. But here is the difference: if AMD were to be driven out of business, you could then expect Intel to double its prices instead of halving them as it has to do now, and it would then be necessary to shell out real bucks in order to get that oldtime Intel thrill again. Myself, not having any money to burn, I think it’s absolutely necessary to show some AMD loyalty, otherwise the Intel Boardroom will revert to its sheep-shearing mentality,not concerned in the least if they draw blood with their large, sharp clippers.
Tom Terranova
August 6th, 2008
at 10:34am
Great comment, Jerry!