On February 8, Bill Gates phoned Jerry Sanders, AMD's chairman to enlist him as a witness for its longrunning antitrust trial.

During the call, Sanders asked for a favour - to go public with support for Hammer, its upcoming 64-bit CPU platform.

"Yes," agreed Sanders. "I asked Mr. Gates to hold Intel to the same standard he held us to."

The quotes come from the Reuters account of Sanders 'time on the stand yesterday.

And in written testimony to the court, Sanders quotes from AMD's annual report: "If we fail to retain the support and certifications of Microsoft, our ability to market our processors could be materially adversely affected."

This does not sound like a relationship of equals, does it? Sanders is supporting Microsoft in its attempt to quash the proposal from the nine states to force the company to produce a stripped-down, modular Windows. This will create anarchy, Sanders reckons. Or rather this is what Bill Gates reckons, and what Sanders parrots.

For Sanders is a busy man. So busy that he could not found the time to read the nine states' case against Microsoft before taking the stand as a witness in the longrunning antitrust trial.

During the February 8 phone call, Gates had told him they were "crazy" and would fragment the Windows operating system, Sanders said. "You've never checked to this day whether what Mr. Gates told you... was true in the remedies," Gutman said, Reuters reports.

Not very helpful to Microsoft, is it?

It is understandable that AMD should want Microsoft's support for Hammer. It's all very well developing 64-bit chips, but there needs to be developers to produce software with 64-bit extensions. Otherwise, the point of buying the 64-bit CPUs is greatly diminished. It will be interesting to see how keen Microsoft will be to support AMD's 64-bit push, following Sanders botched support. ®

Reuters article