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New York Launches Intel Antitrust Investigation
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 10, 2008 06:56 PM
from the chip-on-their-shoulders dept.
from the chip-on-their-shoulders dept.
Multiple users have notified us of reports that the Attorney General of New York has initiated an antitrust investigation of Intel. The EU served Intel with similar charges last July, and AMD has been battling Intel over antitrust issues for some time. Quoting the New York Times:
"The subpoenas from Mr. Cuomo's office will seek internal memos, billing documents, and correspondence between Intel and its customers to determine whether the company engaged in a variety of anticompetitive practices, like penalized customers, primarily computer manufacturers, for purchasing processors from competitors or improperly paying customers to use Intel chips exclusively. Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel, said the company would comply with Mr. Cuomo's subpoena but denied any illegality."
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Why can't..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to mention that clock speed isn't everything. People often overlook the FSB for one. AMD has a much better FSB speed.
Then there is the fact that I figured the Slashdot crowd wasn't the type to support evil anti-trust corporations like Intel.
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That's not exactly how it worked for us.... (Score:4, Interesting)
They developed a notebook computer. There were 2 flavors: one used an Intel low-power 386 chip, and the other an AMD low-power 286. (They were going to use an Intel low-power 286, but Intel canceled the chip.)
The next month, they got shorted their allotment of 486 chips. Which meant that they couldn't ship all the desktop computers they'd built. There was no 2nd source for 486 chips. I was told that Intel was very clear why this happened. I think the AMD version was soon discontinued.
Not long after, Intel was investigated for this sort of thing. When the authorities contacted this company, they were so afraid of Intel that they denied anything like this had happened to them.
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Did the sales rep tell you this before you were buying, or after you'd gone into production?
Nice story, but... (Score:2)
Notebook? I think they were too big to be that, are you sure you don't mean suitcase computer?
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As it happens one sits in my office as a dust collector. My tape measure says:
Width: 11.25"
Depth: 9"
Thick: 2.25"
I've read on-line that the weight is ~6.5 lbs.
Larger than most notebooks of today, but still I think a notebook.
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The only reason there was competition in the PC processor market in the first place was because IBM insisted on it. As IBM lost power there was noone with the clout to pressure intel into releasing it's designs so the other manufacturers of PC processors had to switch to reverse engineering or making thier own designs.
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This is patent infringement! (Score:5, Insightful)
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The average New Yorker doesn't know what "lexicon", "politely" or "OUTSIDE of New York" means.
Disclaimer: I've been to New York. I loved the people. Didn't like the atmosphere. Don't plan to go back.
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Gerald Ford told NYC to drop dead once, and it didn't work out too well for him come 1976.
If Intel were to decide it would rather discontinue doing business in the state of New York altogether than halt these alleged anticompetitive practices, they'd be fools.
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Easy enough to figure out why. (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure the plant is supposed to be built in Saratoga County, not Fishkill. That's what all the Albany papers have been saying, anyway.
I'm all in favor of trust busting (Score:2)
I'm of course interested in breaking up the vast majority of monopolies.
Why is a state (as opposed to a Federal unit) spending it's money on anti-trust discovery?
It would appear to me that New York, and every other state in the Union, has more pressing issues on which to spend taxpayer money.
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you know (Score:3, Insightful)
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Political Sturm und Drang (Score:1)
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Probably not; Schumer's relationship with Albany is normally not very cordial.
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So Schumer has an interest in protecting/promoting that AMD fab and its jobs in NY, whether California-based Intel deserves the investigation or not.
good investment (Score:1)
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Intel was no more than architect of the PC revolution than IBM or Microsoft. That title belongs to MOS. MOS because they sold a right cheap CPU, and Apple and Commodore because they put together the first real consumer-friendly multipurpose computers; the Apple II and the Commodore PET. Oh yes, and let's not forget VisiCalc, which probably can be credited as much as anything with sparking the PC revolution because a) it was a pretty damned innovative idea and b) it
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The other popular consumer-friendly multipurpose computer of that period was the Radio Shack TRS-80, which ran on a Zilog chip, an improvement of an Intel design. However, these were not the first home computers. The success of the Altair and Imsai computers with Intel chips showed that the idea could actually work. (Back then, the bar for personal computing was a bit higher than now; I read a review that praised a kit for being easy to assemble, on the grounds that the reviewer only had to dig out his
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I don't think Natural Monopoly means what you think it means."An industry is said to be a natural monopoly if one firm can produce a desired output at a lower social cost than two or more firms" [wikipedia.org] The term you are looking for is a technical monopoly. That is a monopoly that can survive "even in the absence of legal regulations or "predatory" measures by the monopolist".
The thing is it CAN be argued that Intel uses predatory measures. If they pay people like Micro
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Re:Intel is a monopoly, but it's a natural one (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Intel is a monopoly, but it's a natural one (Score:5, Insightful)
- At its heart, the semiconductor business is a manufacturing business. In many ways, a company's ability to manufacture the chips is more important than the features of the chip itself. When the larger OEMs announce that they will require 10 million units in the next quarter with DPM of less than 500, there are only a few companies that can meet that kind of demand. Intel has spent tens of billions of dollars to build their manufacturing capabilities and keep them at the leading edge. AMD, on the other hand, has made a series of strategic blunders in this regard over the past 15 years (remember the UMC debacle?). As a result, AMD's has never been able to produce the quantity and quality of product that the larger OEMs demand, and have shut themselves out of the bigger markets. You can't blame Intel for this.
- When the OEMs design products, there is a lot more involved than just picking the CPU. They need to build a whole platform, and problems anywhere in that supply chain will directly impact the OEMs ability to produce and sell that platform. So even if AMD had been able to supply the 10 million Athlon CPUs with the required defect rate to an OEM, would the OEM be able to get enough chipset components within the required defect rate as well? Once again, Intel took charge of its own destiny here as well by designing and making their own chipsets that are backed by the same manufacturing capabilities as their CPUs, and OEMs respond by using the Intel-branded chipsets 90% of the time.
- The supply of the product is one thing, but the quality is another. I'm not talking about the chip's performance, but functional bugs that cause stability issues or data corruption. Slashdot likes to joke about the Pentium FDIV bug, but the truth is that bug scared the crap out of Intel, so they throw enormous resources into their CPU and chipset validation. This translates to direct value to the OEMs in the form of faster time-to-market and lower support costs. If OEMs perceive that on company is validating their products more than the competition, they are going to be more likely to chose that company's design. Remember, this goes for any component of the platform (not just the CPU!), so a flaky northbridge from VIA or NVidia could cause an OEM to drop the AMD platform in favor of Intel as well.
In other words, even though AMD had a superior performance in the Athlon, there were other completely competitive reasons for an OEM to select Intel over AMD, and most of those are a direct result of choices that AMD made.Parent
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Intel's behavior is a textbook case of abuse of monopoly. And, yes, 90% of revenue and 75% of unit sales of a market is a monopoly.
Intel's "incentive" program eff
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Show me the market forces (Score:2, Interesting)
For this point to be valid it must be prohibitively expensive to launch a new product line totalling to say 1M units (something AMD definitely can ship).
Considering that smaller OEMs do exist (10M is what the largest sell worldwide, right?), I believe this to be false. I'd like to see the numbers though.
$10/unit must be OK for n
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Ley was not a scapegoat. Other people were scapegoats for HIM but we finally got to him as well.