EU thumps Intel with more anti-AMD charges
Abusive conduct threesome
It's true. The European Union has thrown a new set of anti-trust allegations at Intel.
Earlier this week, rumors swirled that the EU would spring into action, adding charges to a European Commission investigation against Intel that's been going since 2001. Now the extra charges have arrived, with EU regulators accusing Intel of three new bits of "abusive conduct" designed to wound AMD's place in the x86 processor market.
"First, Intel has provided substantial rebates to a leading European personal computer (PC) retailer conditional on it selling only Intel-based PCs," the EU said in a statement. "Secondly, Intel made payments in order to induce a leading Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to delay the planned launch of a product line incorporating an AMD-based CPU. Thirdly, in a subsequent period, Intel has provided substantial rebates to that same OEM conditional on it obtaining all of its laptop CPU requirements from Intel."
This latest regulatory dish will only slow down the anti-trust case against Intel. The company has eight weeks to respond to the fresh charges and will then have the opportunity to take part in an oral hearing on the matter.
After all that, "the Commission may decide to require Intel to cease the abuse and may impose a fine."
Intel, of course, faces an anti-trust suit from AMD here in the US and is under investigation by the New York Attorney General's office and South Korean regulators.
We're awaiting an official statement from Intel on the latest charges. Up to this point, the company has denied all wrongdoing in the various matters.
The Register is currently involved in a legal action, seeking to make Intel reveal more information related to its US anti-trust proceedings.®
COMMENTS
Intel is guilt!
Hi, I have heard second hand about the deals made with distributors not to sell AMD for better prices, with OEM not to build with AMD, etc. To this day Super Micro makes AMD OEM server boards but does not advertise them on their main website website. The lawsuits has got Intel covering thier butts and these antitrust abuses are stopping but not gone. And for the Opteron/Phenom cache errata, Intel has the same issue in another cache which has never been fixed.
@Flocke
Actually, motorola architecture in 'big endian' proved to be much easier for me than the intel little endian ever did. Looking in memory, the bytes are in the order I would expect them to be instead of being swapped around. It's a matter of preference, but mine's clearly BIG.
You're right about DOS, but for me it's winDOS that really crapped IT.
Industrial Sabotage...
It would get *really interesting* if Intel was responsible for the problems AMD had with the Opteron's late last year, and proof of it was found and usable in court. ;->
@golverd
Little endian is harmless. Imagine you have to add two very large numbers on a bigendian CPU. You start by adding the least significant words together, and adding the carry bit into the addition of the next most significant words. You can have your pointers point passed the end of bigendian numbers (error prone). You can add the size of the numbers to the pointers (waste of time). You can use mixed endian (bigendian bits, little endian words) (Extra hassle to find the Nth bit). Little endian is marginally simpler for arithmetic.
The as for Intel and windows, the damage was already done by the time IBM chose DOS.
Intel lost my vote with the 487 (A complete 486 which only works when connected to a 486 that has had its internal math coprocessor disabled, and requires a motherboard with a coprocessor socket when half the advantage of the 486 was that it did not need an external coprocessor). All because people would not pay £50 for a CPU. Now we have twits willing to pay £500 for a CPU, and Intel laughing all the way to the bank.
Re: Doh
We're seeking to get very redacted documents unredacted.
