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That billion dollar settlement came after they had to close down their fabs due to the anti-competitive moves that Intel had made. A billion doesn't come close

by MoOmer 12y ago

That billion dollar settlement came after they had to close down their fabs due to the anti-competitive moves that Intel had made. A billion doesn't come close to the set-back it caused them. During that time, for those who don't remember, AMD literally couldn't give their chips away, because the vendor kickbacks from Intel still made Intel the better choice.

higherpurpose 12y ago
Indeed. Precisely why it's baffling that no one is currently looking at Intel's heavy subsidization of its mobile Atom chips. Now that they changed their financial structure to be able to hide those subsidies/losses by also selling $160 Atom-based "Pentiums" for PCs, it will be even harder to figure out what Intel is doing. They'll just call them "mobile chips", and the $30+ mobile Atom subsidy will now be masked by the $80+ "Pentium" (but still Atom) markup. Whoever would be looking at "how Atom is doing" all they'll see is that "those chips are profitable" - despite the fact in the actual mobile/smartphone market Intel is selling chips below-cost against the competition to try and steal market share from them. It's also a great way to hide billions upon billions of losses in the smartphone market for years from shareholders, because all the shareholders will see is that the "Client Group is profitable" thanks to the PC profit offset. By the time the antitrust bodies wake up to it, Intel will probably already take out a few ARM chip makers and have a significant market share in mobile (I'm still skeptical about that one, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel is playing very unfair right now and those tactics could help them greatly in the long term). It's also already too late to fix the damage Intel has done with its "bundled" GPUs in laptops against Nvidia and also AMD. In the first few years nobody cared because "Intel graphics suck anyway, and you'll need an Nvidia dedicated GPU for your laptop". So the fact that Intel essentially coerced OEMs into putting their crappy GPUs in laptops that nobody asked for or wanted, so that consumers get used to them, was completely ignored by antitrust bodies. But it was quite obvious to me even then that it would be just a matter of time before those GPUs got good enough to replace most Nvidia GPUs from laptops (hello disruptive innovation theory!). Now you see consumers everywhere actually ask to have the latest integrated Intel GPU - i.e. the damage is already done by its anti-competitive bundling tactics, and no fine will fix that unless we're talking $5+ billion given to Nvidia and AMD, or the antitrust bodies outright ban Intel from bundling its GPU with its CPUs anymore (highly unlikely, especially as now Intel will argue that doing so would cause "great harm to the performance/cost of its chips").

by MoOmer 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago

Indeed. Precisely why it's baffling that no one is currently looking at Intel's heavy subsidization of its mobile Atom chips. Now that they changed their financial structure to be able to hide those subsidies/losses by also selling $160 Atom-based "Pentiums" for PCs, it will be even harder to figure out what Intel is doing. They'll just call them "mobile chips", and the $30+ mobile Atom subsidy will now be masked by the $80+ "Pentium" (but still Atom) markup. Whoever would be looking at "how Atom is doing" all they'll see is that "those chips are profitable" - despite the fact in the actual mobile/smartphone market Intel is selling chips below-cost against the competition to try and steal market share from them. It's also a great way to hide billions upon billions of losses in the smartphone market for years from shareholders, because all the shareholders will see is that the "Client Group is profitable" thanks to the PC profit offset. By the time the antitrust bodies wake up to it, Intel will probably already take out a few ARM chip makers and have a significant market share in mobile (I'm still skeptical about that one, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel is playing very unfair right now and those tactics could help them greatly in the long term). It's also already too late to fix the damage Intel has done with its "bundled" GPUs in laptops against Nvidia and also AMD. In the first few years nobody cared because "Intel graphics suck anyway, and you'll need an Nvidia dedicated GPU for your laptop". So the fact that Intel essentially coerced OEMs into putting their crappy GPUs in laptops that nobody asked for or wanted, so that consumers get used to them, was completely ignored by antitrust bodies. But it was quite obvious to me even then that it would be just a matter of time before those GPUs got good enough to replace most Nvidia GPUs from laptops (hello disruptive innovation theory!). Now you see consumers everywhere actually ask to have the latest integrated Intel GPU - i.e. the damage is already done by its anti-competitive bundling tactics, and no fine will fix that unless we're talking $5+ billion given to Nvidia and AMD, or the antitrust bodies outright ban Intel from bundling its GPU with its CPUs anymore (highly unlikely, especially as now Intel will argue that doing so would cause "great harm to the performance/cost of its chips").