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EU fines Intel $400M for blocking AMD's market access

300 points by RachelF 3y ago

aluminum96 3y ago
Intel is being eaten alive by its competitors, including AMD. Seems overly punitive and detached from reality.
- 3836293648 3y ago
  This is a case from 2007 that got caught up in appeal after appeal. That they've lost ground since does mean they don't deserve fines they've been delaying for ~15 years.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Hmm isnt that usually a sign of corruption and influencing the justice system?
    - Jensson 3y ago
      The initial claim included "below cost", intel argues it didn't sell units below cost. Likely they swamped the investigation team with spreadsheets of all processes and such included in those costs and then I can see it being hard to make progress since you need to go through it to determine if they sold below cost or not. But the important part is that Intel stopped doing those things after the investigation started so that AMD could compete. If they didn't it would be very easy to prove that they are anti competitive. So even though the fines are late the effects have already been here for a long time with AMD doing well today.
      - nickjj 3y ago
        Does below cost only apply for selling certain types of 1-off physical goods? A lot of online apps tend to operate at a loss to gain a large audience and then once they've gained market share they often increase fees or more generally make it more expensive for users. Their business model forces smaller competitors out because a larger funded company can in theory hold out for a longer period of time at a loss. It's surprising this is ok but selling a piece of hardware at a loss is not ok. What about Costco selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store or the idea of a "loss leader"?
        Jensson 3y ago
        Not sure, but I think arguments like is why this lawsuit took so much time. For simpler goods and smaller scale "below cost" to hurt competition is very easy to prove, but when Intel did that for the entirety of Europe and their massive process it was apparently easy for Intel to hide what they did. > What about Costco selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store or the idea of a "loss leader"? Isn't the usual argument that they got surplus stock in some way? Then it isn't below cost, it is loss minimization from a bad investment, and it doesn't hurt competition for chicken since it is a limited amount of time.
        brewdad 3y ago
        Whether you have 100 chickens or 100 million, if they cost you $6 and you sell them for $5, that's below cost. Also, it isn't limited amount of time. This has been Costco's MO for decades.
        Jensson 3y ago
        > Also, it isn't limited amount of time. This has been Costco's MO for decades. Have they sold chicken at below cost for decades with no stop? Really? I think you mean they have sold small portions of their wares at below cost, not that they have sold a specific thing at below cost for extended amounts of time. > Whether you have 100 chickens or 100 million, if they cost you $6 and you sell them for $5, that's below cost. Yeah, but the store as a whole isn't selling at below cost, and on average since those chickens aren't sold at below cost all the time they still make money from chickens. Those things means that on average the store is net positive, and them selling chickens is a net positive. Hence overall they don't sell anything at a net loss, its just for short periods of time they do it and those can be hand waved away. There are a lot of laws surrounding limited time offers that they have to follow.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    You’d think the fines would have inflation baked into it 15 years is a long time with intel stock up more than 80% over last 15 years.
    - ekeane 3y ago
      Eh? Intel stock is basically flat in that time. It was ~28 around this time in 2007 (IIRC, was my hire date), and its now 32. Intel stock is a lot of things, but 'up 80%' hasn't been something true since the early 2000s. ETA: That was 16 years ago I was thinking of, I forgot about the nasty dip in 2008. I misremembered, it was ~26 when I was hired, dipped to 18 the next year, and slowly climbed a while and has been around that $30/share number for ages.
    - blibble 3y ago
      should tie it to inflation or the percentage increase in their stock price, whichever is higher
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  The headline here is a bit misleading. Originally this was a $1.4 billion fine for stuff Intel did back in the 2000s, which has been reduced to $400 million after more than a decade of appeals. It seems obsolete now but Intel's transgressions at the time were very real.
  - chmod775 3y ago
    Specifically these $400 million are the amount of fines that are now set in stone. The other $1000 million are still being fought over in courts.
    - mnau 3y ago
      Excellent. Intel absolutely deserves it. CPU market is duopoly, even today. $1 billion fine seems like a lot, but let's assume $100/CPU, 50% profit margin and 5 years (2002-2007). 1000_000_0000 / 100 / 2 / 5 = 1 000 000. So you would need to sell 1 million CPUs to make a $1 billion profit over 5 years. Eminently doable on EU laptop market, even back then. Definitely doesn't seem disproportionate.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        The x86 CPU market is a duopoly you mean
        DiabloD3 3y ago
        This is true, however, keep in mind that x86 is the 4th most produced CPU family, behind ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC, and RISC-V is coming up real damned fast to bump x86 down to 5th. All CPUs today are RISC descendants: yes, even Intel and AMD's x86. The first "not actually a CISC x86 at all internally, but 100% a RISC" was the Pentium Pro (1995, and recycled a lot of work put into the i960, thanks to Fred Pollack), and AMD's first real[1] CPUs weren't x86 but a RISC descendant called the AM29k, which when they slapped an x86 decoder on it and it became the original K5 (1996), which sometimes won benchmarks against the Pentium, especially on code that wouldn't take advantage of the Pentium dual ALU design; the AM29k/K5's OoOE was superior due to it's RISC nature. So, although, yes, technically there is a x86 duopoly, but x86 kind of ceased to exist meaningfully in the 90s. It is a RISC descendant monopoly, and whoever is in the lead at any given moment is who has the best fab tech; currently it's a fist fight between two Jim Keller architectures (he worked on both AMD's Zen and PASemi's ARM family) both using top tier TSMC tech. Jim Keller himself is a very accomplished RISC jockey, and I absolutely respect him and any team he's been part of. [1] Depending on how you define real; the team that left Intel after management screwed them and started AMD, reverse engineered and reimplemented the CPU that put Intel on the map, the 8080, called the Am9080, after making a lot of "bag of chips" sort of ICs that weren't CPUs. All the other CPUs between that and the AM29k were second source chips under license.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Intel absolutely tried to drown AMD in the 2000s. The fines are warranted.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    I do wonder - in a parallel universe where Intel had not played dirty - would AMD have naturally risen on top? More sales -> more revenue -> more R&D -> better products. At the very least, if AMD had been able to maintain competition for longer, would we have been stuck at 2/4 cores for so long? Still struggling to make ECC RAM mainstream?
    - mjevans 3y ago
      AMD Might have even kept their own fabs... Honestly the damages should see compounded inflation applied.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      AMD by the end of the 2000s was beaten and broke. And by 2009 AMD was so down in the dumbs that they settled the lawsuit with Intel on arguably not favorable terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v.... We have to remember that Intel went all in on Itanium and it was AMD who made 64bit happen. They absolutely kicked Intels ass on performance and price for quite a while but were not able to leverage that. So yes, the future would have been quite different.
    - wmf 3y ago
      AMD has been ahead of Intel for the last five years or so but they haven't captured the market share that they likely "deserve". Path dependence and marketing really work.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Is ECC RAM “mainstream” even now?
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  AMD was nearly bankrupted by the scheme the EU is punishing. Intel kept the EU sanctions in appeals hell for a good decade and a half while they proceeded to do what every top-heavy monopolistic asshole company does: make terrible bets and destroy their own innovation. The only reason why they're floundering now is that Lisa Su resurrected AMD and built a star team of CPU designers that are kicking Intel's ass. However, that is not a reason to ignore antitrust as "outdated regulation". If anything, AMD is doing a some of the same shit Intel did when they were dominant, because that's just how the CPU market works now, itself because we let Intel set the standard of behavior a decade ago by failing to punish them for cheating. Anyway, that's why we need more overly punitive fines detached from reality.
gU9x3u8XmQNG 3y ago
I’m surprised to see no, though few in total, comments related to the vendors accepting the money. It’s shocking that Acer, HP, and Lenovo all accepted incentives (money) to monopolise the market, and are just as guilty in my opinion. This seems to be black and white, obviously inappropriate; yet has taken decades and still unresolved. Really…
- shkkmo 3y ago
  It think the general rule of thumbs is that accepting money to help other companies monopolize their markets is fine as long as you don't try to monopolize your own. Personally, I think that all the stuff like this should also be illegal, even without a monopoly. Exclusivity contracts and stuff with that goal should be illegal. However, we'll have to pass new laws to get there.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    There's a visibility question too. If Intel comes to my computer company and offers me a sweet rebate, what do I know about what they're doing with my competitors? So if it were illegal to receive money to help a company monopolize their market, how would the company receiving the funds be able to determine that's the case?
  - avar 3y ago
    Is general it's not so clear cut. If I make wheat and you run a bakery I might offer you a 30% discount for the next 5 years, but only if I'm your only wheat supplier. This sort of arrangement allows us to spread the risk of market uncertainties over that period. I can then build extra capacity, and you get a cheaper product, or one with less price uncertainty. Maybe we should do away with this, and say that bakeries must buy wheat like airlines buy fuel, i.e. through more complex financial instruments. Now, I may be doing this because I'm one of only two companies making wheat, and I'm looking to drive the other one out of business. That's basically what Intel was doing here. But it's not clear to me that we should conclude that exclusivity deals in general are bad.
    - 3y ago
jongjong 3y ago
What kind of economy is this that a supplier can afford to pay meaningful sums to their customers? You'd think in a functioning system, the flow of funds should only go in one direction; from customer to supplier. The fact that such moves might make financial sense says something about our underlying financial system.
- wmf 3y ago
  Realistically these rebates are a fraction of the cost of Intel products. Intel wasn't paying their customers (not counting the Atom contra-revenue fiasco); they were charging slightly less.
- diego_sandoval 3y ago
  > What kind of economy is this One with patents. I presume that if we didn't have patents for processor architectures, competition would have made these practices completely unviable, and we wouldn't have had a decades-long duopoly in the CPU market.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I very much doubt the patents are the problem in this case. Especially since, if there hadn't been patents, they would have just had everything as trade secrets. It's not like patenting rounded corners, most of the stuff that gives Intel and AMD an edge is highly complex and innovative.
    - runeks 3y ago
      That’s the essential problem with parents: nobody really know how it affects competition. And therefore the status quo doesn’t change. I think we should swap the burden of proof: patents should be abolished if it cannot be shown that they’re a net positive for consumers. We shouldn’t be supporting a practice whose effect is unknown and possibly detrimental to consumers.
    - runeks 3y ago
      > Especially since, if there hadn't been patents, they would have just had everything as trade secrets. Reverse engineering the x86 instruction set would be rather trivial for even a small company. Releasing a x86 product, however, is not possible because of patents and Intel lawyers.
pella 3y ago
"Questions & Answers - Antitrust: Commission re-imposes €376.36 million fine on Intel for anticompetitive practices in the market for computer chips" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_23_4571 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... "Antitrust: Commission re-imposes €376.36 million fine on Intel for anticompetitive practices in the market for computer chips" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_4570 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_...
demondemidi 3y ago
Awesome. It was worse in the 90's, but still glad to see it happen. Intel had top engineers, but they achieved dominance through hefty use of machinations, and not through merit alone. Who knows how many billions Intel acquired through slimy legal actions.
benreesman 3y ago
I’ll leave the lawyering to the lawyers, but big picture it seems weird to be hitting Intel with any of the “you need to play fair” stuff. They’re operating at between a 2-4 process node handicap (depending how one counts) and turning out workable stuff (e.g. Raptor Lake) strictly by competing their butts off on micro architecture and other hard, legitimate stuff. My hat is fucking off to the people turning out product that keeps them in the race with thermal/transistor budgets from like, before COVID. There’s a dude in my building who wears an ASML badge and I always ask him: Gelsinger going to get EUV going? He obviously can’t answer but he gets this little smirk. I would love it if it all landed at once: HDET SKUs with 128 physical cores, ARC cards competitive with 4xxx and drivers, and a domestic pure-play foundry business that the PRC can’t even remotely disrupt in their wildest dreams. AMD wants to generate some cap? Pay the big bucks to get ROCm up to par and trim some of that trillion off Jensen’s “how much you got on you?” pricing strategy.
- mkl 3y ago
  It may seem weird now, but certainly not in 2009, when this case is from.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    With the aforementioned caveat about not being a lawyer (or regulator), it does seem on average that there’s a certain discretion involved when the outcome of a case that’s taken fifteen years to reach a judgement on is implemented in light of a presently obtaining situation that renders the appropriate remedy at that time counter-productive now.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Intel fanboi alert
  - benreesman 3y ago
    I’ve bought processors (and GPUs) from all the major vendors and always been pleased when competition got me a better deal, either individually or on behalf of a business. It’s more like a competition fanboi alert, and watching NVIDIA sit at 1.2T in cap while AMD sits at 175B with competitive (if not strictly parity) GPUs because apparently writing a driver stack that works is out of reach for a company that could trivially finance a Sheryl-style “triple the comp of all the CUDA ballers” just…decides not to? Yeah, I’d like to see some pressure applied by people who know how to write drivers, document their gear, and obviously haven’t cut a deal about supercompute vs. AI-per-se. Zen4 is awesome, add in the TSMC edge? It’s what you’ve got on multi-core x86_64 at the moment. Would I like to see alternatives to Epyc and 4090s that have the same 24Gb of GDDR6 that my 2090s did? Yes I fucking would. And would I like to see Taiwan treated like a nation and not a geopolitical football? That sounds pretty much ethically right too. I cordially invite your input on where I’ve gotten this wrong.
8jef 3y ago
The situation is still the same, happening as we speak. This court case is from a long time ago, but look at the market since the Ryzen inception, the last five years, and you'll find it hard to purchase worthwhile AMD stuff outside of some niches (desktop CPUs, low quality plastic gaming laptops with TN screens, or super low quality budget laptops with sub-Ryzen apus). Just go to BestBuy, or browse Newegg, or else, and good luck finding a great Ryzen product in stock that you can purchase. All the interesting stuff, for creators, or graphic designers, or anything high end, they only have Intel products for sale. Try this: find me an in-stock 2-in-1 Ryzen 7 or 9 metal case laptop with high nits 2k+ touchscreen, no discrete GPU, great backlit keyboard, a large battery, and a spare M.2 slot. Or try to find anything bizarre or exotic (like those laptop with 2 screens instead of 1 + keyboard). Nothing with AMD, ever. Almost all are / were easy to find in Intel flavor. Have fun trying to put your hands on any worthwile AMD product.
- tehlike 3y ago
  Yes, i did this exercise few years ago, I wanted 4K screen with ryzen, and there was none. Ended up going with intel.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    ThinkPad T14 3rd gen? I didn't want a 4k screen but I think those were available 2-3 years ago.
    - tehlike 3y ago
      You may be right. This could have saved me having to carry a bulky charger. Next time!
- clouddrover 3y ago
  > Or try to find anything bizarre or exotic Here's something exotic soon to be released with AMD: https://frame.work https://frame.work
  - 3y ago
praptak 3y ago
Did US do anything about the same stuff?
- beebeepka 3y ago
  It did. Both the EU and the US slapped Intel on the wrist years ago. Now we're "fining" them a few million while pumping billions because we "need fabs in Europe". We do, but not theirs It's entirely wrong to give money to intel, whoever you are. They are the devil and have treated us horrible. These guys deserve nothing but contempt
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    Sure but mostly the only game in town for foundries (along with Samsung), so you can't just financially destroy them with a likely war between China and the US over Taiwan coming up in the next 5-10 years
sylware 3y ago
Wait for Big Tech and their web engines working hard at excluding small tech (noscript/basic (x)html browsers).
rhuru 3y ago
Broadly I see that EU is engaging in this behaviour a lot where they fine companies with claims of them distorting market but in reality the EU market appears to be less competitive, less innovative and more rent seeking that USA.
- simondotau 3y ago
  As an outsider to both the EU and USA, I see similar levels of innovation from corporations and market distortion by governments on both sides. The key difference is that the USA is boastful of their innovation but has epic cognitive dissonance when it comes to government intervention. Whereas the EU is boastful of their market distortions while innovation is often hidden behind language barriers.
ACV001 3y ago
This is called cost of business. As long as the fines are smaller than the profit they made from this, it will continue in a form or another.
nologic01 3y ago
Digital tech has been monopolistic from early on. Like fish in water we dont even know what a truly competitive information technology sector would look like. My rough guess is that we would be two decades ahead in the quality and variety of hardware and software (a 2 x acceleration vs the stagnation of locked-in artificial equilibria). Information technology is still a huge phase space of possibilities that lie unexplored so that a tiny set of vested interests can have a predictable monetary return.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >Digital tech has been monopolistic from early on. Even into the early '90s, I don't think that was really the case.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Please write the history, don't just hint add it. Who was the monopoly in the 70s-90s. > My rough guess is that we would be two decades ahead in the quality and variety of hardware and software Literally based on what? You think Moores law would be 2x faster? Why? Intel never had a monopoly outside of maybe in 2000s for a few years.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Are you being pedantic? Do you even know the shape of a competitive market? [1] I am not conducting a legalistic argument. Name a period where digital tech was not controlled by a cozy arrangement of one or two entities, offering all the menu options of Cola vs Pepsi. > Literally based on what? It is hard to make it an "exact science" when we don't have actual long periods of competition driven innovation to juxtapose. But there are plenty of hints. Take for example the story of RISC. The architecture is only now being "rediscovered" after being crushed for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_concentration
    - thfuran 3y ago
      >Are you being pedantic? Do you even know the shape of a competitive market? [1] Do you know what the landscape was like in the 80s?
tormeh 3y ago
What is this? A fine for ants?
juliangmp 3y ago
Only 376 million Euros? Of course Intel wouldn't appeal, thats absolutely nothing to them.
lemper 3y ago
I couldn't care less who can buy what with how much effort in some market. but I really really love it when EU slaps some companies with hundreds of millions of fine. way to go EU! as long as your politicians are not corrupt, that is!

300 points by RachelF 3y ago

aluminum96 3y ago

Intel is being eaten alive by its competitors, including AMD. Seems overly punitive and detached from reality.

3836293648 3y ago
This is a case from 2007 that got caught up in appeal after appeal. That they've lost ground since does mean they don't deserve fines they've been delaying for ~15 years.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Hmm isnt that usually a sign of corruption and influencing the justice system?
  - Jensson 3y ago
    The initial claim included "below cost", intel argues it didn't sell units below cost. Likely they swamped the investigation team with spreadsheets of all processes and such included in those costs and then I can see it being hard to make progress since you need to go through it to determine if they sold below cost or not. But the important part is that Intel stopped doing those things after the investigation started so that AMD could compete. If they didn't it would be very easy to prove that they are anti competitive. So even though the fines are late the effects have already been here for a long time with AMD doing well today.
    - nickjj 3y ago
      Does below cost only apply for selling certain types of 1-off physical goods? A lot of online apps tend to operate at a loss to gain a large audience and then once they've gained market share they often increase fees or more generally make it more expensive for users. Their business model forces smaller competitors out because a larger funded company can in theory hold out for a longer period of time at a loss. It's surprising this is ok but selling a piece of hardware at a loss is not ok. What about Costco selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store or the idea of a "loss leader"?
      - Jensson 3y ago
        Not sure, but I think arguments like is why this lawsuit took so much time. For simpler goods and smaller scale "below cost" to hurt competition is very easy to prove, but when Intel did that for the entirety of Europe and their massive process it was apparently easy for Intel to hide what they did. > What about Costco selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store or the idea of a "loss leader"? Isn't the usual argument that they got surplus stock in some way? Then it isn't below cost, it is loss minimization from a bad investment, and it doesn't hurt competition for chicken since it is a limited amount of time.
        brewdad 3y ago
        Whether you have 100 chickens or 100 million, if they cost you $6 and you sell them for $5, that's below cost. Also, it isn't limited amount of time. This has been Costco's MO for decades.
        Jensson 3y ago
        > Also, it isn't limited amount of time. This has been Costco's MO for decades. Have they sold chicken at below cost for decades with no stop? Really? I think you mean they have sold small portions of their wares at below cost, not that they have sold a specific thing at below cost for extended amounts of time. > Whether you have 100 chickens or 100 million, if they cost you $6 and you sell them for $5, that's below cost. Yeah, but the store as a whole isn't selling at below cost, and on average since those chickens aren't sold at below cost all the time they still make money from chickens. Those things means that on average the store is net positive, and them selling chickens is a net positive. Hence overall they don't sell anything at a net loss, its just for short periods of time they do it and those can be hand waved away. There are a lot of laws surrounding limited time offers that they have to follow.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  You’d think the fines would have inflation baked into it 15 years is a long time with intel stock up more than 80% over last 15 years.
  - ekeane 3y ago
    Eh? Intel stock is basically flat in that time. It was ~28 around this time in 2007 (IIRC, was my hire date), and its now 32. Intel stock is a lot of things, but 'up 80%' hasn't been something true since the early 2000s. ETA: That was 16 years ago I was thinking of, I forgot about the nasty dip in 2008. I misremembered, it was ~26 when I was hired, dipped to 18 the next year, and slowly climbed a while and has been around that $30/share number for ages.
  - blibble 3y ago
    should tie it to inflation or the percentage increase in their stock price, whichever is higher
Analemma_ 3y ago
The headline here is a bit misleading. Originally this was a $1.4 billion fine for stuff Intel did back in the 2000s, which has been reduced to $400 million after more than a decade of appeals. It seems obsolete now but Intel's transgressions at the time were very real.
- chmod775 3y ago
  Specifically these $400 million are the amount of fines that are now set in stone. The other $1000 million are still being fought over in courts.
  - mnau 3y ago
    Excellent. Intel absolutely deserves it. CPU market is duopoly, even today. $1 billion fine seems like a lot, but let's assume $100/CPU, 50% profit margin and 5 years (2002-2007). 1000_000_0000 / 100 / 2 / 5 = 1 000 000. So you would need to sell 1 million CPUs to make a $1 billion profit over 5 years. Eminently doable on EU laptop market, even back then. Definitely doesn't seem disproportionate.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      The x86 CPU market is a duopoly you mean
      - DiabloD3 3y ago
        This is true, however, keep in mind that x86 is the 4th most produced CPU family, behind ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC, and RISC-V is coming up real damned fast to bump x86 down to 5th. All CPUs today are RISC descendants: yes, even Intel and AMD's x86. The first "not actually a CISC x86 at all internally, but 100% a RISC" was the Pentium Pro (1995, and recycled a lot of work put into the i960, thanks to Fred Pollack), and AMD's first real[1] CPUs weren't x86 but a RISC descendant called the AM29k, which when they slapped an x86 decoder on it and it became the original K5 (1996), which sometimes won benchmarks against the Pentium, especially on code that wouldn't take advantage of the Pentium dual ALU design; the AM29k/K5's OoOE was superior due to it's RISC nature. So, although, yes, technically there is a x86 duopoly, but x86 kind of ceased to exist meaningfully in the 90s. It is a RISC descendant monopoly, and whoever is in the lead at any given moment is who has the best fab tech; currently it's a fist fight between two Jim Keller architectures (he worked on both AMD's Zen and PASemi's ARM family) both using top tier TSMC tech. Jim Keller himself is a very accomplished RISC jockey, and I absolutely respect him and any team he's been part of. [1] Depending on how you define real; the team that left Intel after management screwed them and started AMD, reverse engineered and reimplemented the CPU that put Intel on the map, the 8080, called the Am9080, after making a lot of "bag of chips" sort of ICs that weren't CPUs. All the other CPUs between that and the AM29k were second source chips under license.
flangola7 3y ago
Intel absolutely tried to drown AMD in the 2000s. The fines are warranted.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  I do wonder - in a parallel universe where Intel had not played dirty - would AMD have naturally risen on top? More sales -> more revenue -> more R&D -> better products. At the very least, if AMD had been able to maintain competition for longer, would we have been stuck at 2/4 cores for so long? Still struggling to make ECC RAM mainstream?
  - mjevans 3y ago
    AMD Might have even kept their own fabs... Honestly the damages should see compounded inflation applied.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    AMD by the end of the 2000s was beaten and broke. And by 2009 AMD was so down in the dumbs that they settled the lawsuit with Intel on arguably not favorable terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v.... We have to remember that Intel went all in on Itanium and it was AMD who made 64bit happen. They absolutely kicked Intels ass on performance and price for quite a while but were not able to leverage that. So yes, the future would have been quite different.
  - wmf 3y ago
    AMD has been ahead of Intel for the last five years or so but they haven't captured the market share that they likely "deserve". Path dependence and marketing really work.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Is ECC RAM “mainstream” even now?
kmeisthax 3y ago
AMD was nearly bankrupted by the scheme the EU is punishing. Intel kept the EU sanctions in appeals hell for a good decade and a half while they proceeded to do what every top-heavy monopolistic asshole company does: make terrible bets and destroy their own innovation. The only reason why they're floundering now is that Lisa Su resurrected AMD and built a star team of CPU designers that are kicking Intel's ass. However, that is not a reason to ignore antitrust as "outdated regulation". If anything, AMD is doing a some of the same shit Intel did when they were dominant, because that's just how the CPU market works now, itself because we let Intel set the standard of behavior a decade ago by failing to punish them for cheating. Anyway, that's why we need more overly punitive fines detached from reality.

gU9x3u8XmQNG 3y ago

I’m surprised to see no, though few in total, comments related to the vendors accepting the money. It’s shocking that Acer, HP, and Lenovo all accepted incentives (money) to monopolise the market, and are just as guilty in my opinion. This seems to be black and white, obviously inappropriate; yet has taken decades and still unresolved. Really…

shkkmo 3y ago
It think the general rule of thumbs is that accepting money to help other companies monopolize their markets is fine as long as you don't try to monopolize your own. Personally, I think that all the stuff like this should also be illegal, even without a monopoly. Exclusivity contracts and stuff with that goal should be illegal. However, we'll have to pass new laws to get there.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  There's a visibility question too. If Intel comes to my computer company and offers me a sweet rebate, what do I know about what they're doing with my competitors? So if it were illegal to receive money to help a company monopolize their market, how would the company receiving the funds be able to determine that's the case?
- avar 3y ago
  Is general it's not so clear cut. If I make wheat and you run a bakery I might offer you a 30% discount for the next 5 years, but only if I'm your only wheat supplier. This sort of arrangement allows us to spread the risk of market uncertainties over that period. I can then build extra capacity, and you get a cheaper product, or one with less price uncertainty. Maybe we should do away with this, and say that bakeries must buy wheat like airlines buy fuel, i.e. through more complex financial instruments. Now, I may be doing this because I'm one of only two companies making wheat, and I'm looking to drive the other one out of business. That's basically what Intel was doing here. But it's not clear to me that we should conclude that exclusivity deals in general are bad.
  - 3y ago

jongjong 3y ago

What kind of economy is this that a supplier can afford to pay meaningful sums to their customers? You'd think in a functioning system, the flow of funds should only go in one direction; from customer to supplier. The fact that such moves might make financial sense says something about our underlying financial system.

wmf 3y ago
Realistically these rebates are a fraction of the cost of Intel products. Intel wasn't paying their customers (not counting the Atom contra-revenue fiasco); they were charging slightly less.
diego_sandoval 3y ago
> What kind of economy is this One with patents. I presume that if we didn't have patents for processor architectures, competition would have made these practices completely unviable, and we wouldn't have had a decades-long duopoly in the CPU market.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  I very much doubt the patents are the problem in this case. Especially since, if there hadn't been patents, they would have just had everything as trade secrets. It's not like patenting rounded corners, most of the stuff that gives Intel and AMD an edge is highly complex and innovative.
  - runeks 3y ago
    That’s the essential problem with parents: nobody really know how it affects competition. And therefore the status quo doesn’t change. I think we should swap the burden of proof: patents should be abolished if it cannot be shown that they’re a net positive for consumers. We shouldn’t be supporting a practice whose effect is unknown and possibly detrimental to consumers.
  - runeks 3y ago
    > Especially since, if there hadn't been patents, they would have just had everything as trade secrets. Reverse engineering the x86 instruction set would be rather trivial for even a small company. Releasing a x86 product, however, is not possible because of patents and Intel lawyers.

pella 3y ago

"Questions & Answers - Antitrust: Commission re-imposes €376.36 million fine on Intel for anticompetitive practices in the market for computer chips" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_23_4571 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... "Antitrust: Commission re-imposes €376.36 million fine on Intel for anticompetitive practices in the market for computer chips" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_4570 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_...

demondemidi 3y ago

Awesome. It was worse in the 90's, but still glad to see it happen. Intel had top engineers, but they achieved dominance through hefty use of machinations, and not through merit alone. Who knows how many billions Intel acquired through slimy legal actions.

benreesman 3y ago

I’ll leave the lawyering to the lawyers, but big picture it seems weird to be hitting Intel with any of the “you need to play fair” stuff. They’re operating at between a 2-4 process node handicap (depending how one counts) and turning out workable stuff (e.g. Raptor Lake) strictly by competing their butts off on micro architecture and other hard, legitimate stuff. My hat is fucking off to the people turning out product that keeps them in the race with thermal/transistor budgets from like, before COVID. There’s a dude in my building who wears an ASML badge and I always ask him: Gelsinger going to get EUV going? He obviously can’t answer but he gets this little smirk. I would love it if it all landed at once: HDET SKUs with 128 physical cores, ARC cards competitive with 4xxx and drivers, and a domestic pure-play foundry business that the PRC can’t even remotely disrupt in their wildest dreams. AMD wants to generate some cap? Pay the big bucks to get ROCm up to par and trim some of that trillion off Jensen’s “how much you got on you?” pricing strategy.

mkl 3y ago
It may seem weird now, but certainly not in 2009, when this case is from.
- benreesman 3y ago
  With the aforementioned caveat about not being a lawyer (or regulator), it does seem on average that there’s a certain discretion involved when the outcome of a case that’s taken fifteen years to reach a judgement on is implemented in light of a presently obtaining situation that renders the appropriate remedy at that time counter-productive now.
beebeepka 3y ago
Intel fanboi alert
- benreesman 3y ago
  I’ve bought processors (and GPUs) from all the major vendors and always been pleased when competition got me a better deal, either individually or on behalf of a business. It’s more like a competition fanboi alert, and watching NVIDIA sit at 1.2T in cap while AMD sits at 175B with competitive (if not strictly parity) GPUs because apparently writing a driver stack that works is out of reach for a company that could trivially finance a Sheryl-style “triple the comp of all the CUDA ballers” just…decides not to? Yeah, I’d like to see some pressure applied by people who know how to write drivers, document their gear, and obviously haven’t cut a deal about supercompute vs. AI-per-se. Zen4 is awesome, add in the TSMC edge? It’s what you’ve got on multi-core x86_64 at the moment. Would I like to see alternatives to Epyc and 4090s that have the same 24Gb of GDDR6 that my 2090s did? Yes I fucking would. And would I like to see Taiwan treated like a nation and not a geopolitical football? That sounds pretty much ethically right too. I cordially invite your input on where I’ve gotten this wrong.

8jef 3y ago

The situation is still the same, happening as we speak. This court case is from a long time ago, but look at the market since the Ryzen inception, the last five years, and you'll find it hard to purchase worthwhile AMD stuff outside of some niches (desktop CPUs, low quality plastic gaming laptops with TN screens, or super low quality budget laptops with sub-Ryzen apus). Just go to BestBuy, or browse Newegg, or else, and good luck finding a great Ryzen product in stock that you can purchase. All the interesting stuff, for creators, or graphic designers, or anything high end, they only have Intel products for sale. Try this: find me an in-stock 2-in-1 Ryzen 7 or 9 metal case laptop with high nits 2k+ touchscreen, no discrete GPU, great backlit keyboard, a large battery, and a spare M.2 slot. Or try to find anything bizarre or exotic (like those laptop with 2 screens instead of 1 + keyboard). Nothing with AMD, ever. Almost all are / were easy to find in Intel flavor. Have fun trying to put your hands on any worthwile AMD product.

tehlike 3y ago
Yes, i did this exercise few years ago, I wanted 4K screen with ryzen, and there was none. Ended up going with intel.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  ThinkPad T14 3rd gen? I didn't want a 4k screen but I think those were available 2-3 years ago.
  - tehlike 3y ago
    You may be right. This could have saved me having to carry a bulky charger. Next time!
clouddrover 3y ago
> Or try to find anything bizarre or exotic Here's something exotic soon to be released with AMD: https://frame.work https://frame.work
- 3y ago

praptak 3y ago

Did US do anything about the same stuff?

beebeepka 3y ago
It did. Both the EU and the US slapped Intel on the wrist years ago. Now we're "fining" them a few million while pumping billions because we "need fabs in Europe". We do, but not theirs It's entirely wrong to give money to intel, whoever you are. They are the devil and have treated us horrible. These guys deserve nothing but contempt
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  Sure but mostly the only game in town for foundries (along with Samsung), so you can't just financially destroy them with a likely war between China and the US over Taiwan coming up in the next 5-10 years

sylware 3y ago

Wait for Big Tech and their web engines working hard at excluding small tech (noscript/basic (x)html browsers).

rhuru 3y ago

Broadly I see that EU is engaging in this behaviour a lot where they fine companies with claims of them distorting market but in reality the EU market appears to be less competitive, less innovative and more rent seeking that USA.

simondotau 3y ago
As an outsider to both the EU and USA, I see similar levels of innovation from corporations and market distortion by governments on both sides. The key difference is that the USA is boastful of their innovation but has epic cognitive dissonance when it comes to government intervention. Whereas the EU is boastful of their market distortions while innovation is often hidden behind language barriers.

ACV001 3y ago

This is called cost of business. As long as the fines are smaller than the profit they made from this, it will continue in a form or another.

nologic01 3y ago

Digital tech has been monopolistic from early on. Like fish in water we dont even know what a truly competitive information technology sector would look like. My rough guess is that we would be two decades ahead in the quality and variety of hardware and software (a 2 x acceleration vs the stagnation of locked-in artificial equilibria). Information technology is still a huge phase space of possibilities that lie unexplored so that a tiny set of vested interests can have a predictable monetary return.

thfuran 3y ago
>Digital tech has been monopolistic from early on. Even into the early '90s, I don't think that was really the case.
panick21_ 3y ago
Please write the history, don't just hint add it. Who was the monopoly in the 70s-90s. > My rough guess is that we would be two decades ahead in the quality and variety of hardware and software Literally based on what? You think Moores law would be 2x faster? Why? Intel never had a monopoly outside of maybe in 2000s for a few years.
- nologic01 3y ago
  Are you being pedantic? Do you even know the shape of a competitive market? [1] I am not conducting a legalistic argument. Name a period where digital tech was not controlled by a cozy arrangement of one or two entities, offering all the menu options of Cola vs Pepsi. > Literally based on what? It is hard to make it an "exact science" when we don't have actual long periods of competition driven innovation to juxtapose. But there are plenty of hints. Take for example the story of RISC. The architecture is only now being "rediscovered" after being crushed for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_concentration
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >Are you being pedantic? Do you even know the shape of a competitive market? [1] Do you know what the landscape was like in the 80s?

tormeh 3y ago

What is this? A fine for ants?

juliangmp 3y ago

Only 376 million Euros? Of course Intel wouldn't appeal, thats absolutely nothing to them.

lemper 3y ago

I couldn't care less who can buy what with how much effort in some market. but I really really love it when EU slaps some companies with hundreds of millions of fine. way to go EU! as long as your politicians are not corrupt, that is!