Intel and Antitrust: A Brief History
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A recent raid on Intel's Munich office by EC investigators is the latest in a long history of antitrust woes.
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Intel dishes up its response to the European Commission's allegations it violated antitrust laws with its rebate practice. The Commission is the latest agency to weigh in with allegations Intel is using its rebates to reduce, or shut out, competition in t
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(InfoWorld) - AÂ federal judge in Delaware has dismissed portions of a class-action suit that accused Intel Corp. of violating antitrust laws. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan, in a ruling issued Wednesday, said that a U.S. court has no jurisdiction over the foreign conduct claims in a lawsuit that seeks monetary damages for U.S. consumers and businesses who purchased PCs with Intel chips. Those consumers say they were forced to pay too much because Intel used its near-monopoly position to bar computer makers from using Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) chips, thus eliminating competition and keeping prices artificially high. The case has no direct relation to the antitrust suit leveled against Intel in 2005 by AMD, but mirrors the same charges, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. Farnan is hearing both cases, and in September made the same decision about the AMD version. The ruling means that even if the court found Intel guilty of forcing up prices, the plaintiffs could not calculate the damages they won by including PC sales by foreign vendors like Acer Inc., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp., Mulloy said. They would have to base their claim solely on sales by U.S. vendors like Dell Inc., Gateway Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Still, both AMD and the foreign consumers will continue pressing their cases because Farnan also ruled they could use foreign evidence to build a domestic case against Intel. "AMD and the class [action suit] would need to sue Intel in foreign jurisdictions to recover monetary damages that were incurred outside the U.S.," said AMD spokesman Michael Silverman. "From our perspective -- and I suspect the class would say the same -- the critical piece was to gain access to that foreign discovery. In both cases, the judge has allowed that access." In addition, the class-action suit concerns only the harm caused to domestic customers, said Daniel A. Small, a lawyer for the firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld and Toll, of Washington, D.C. who argued the plaintiffs' case. "We're pursuing very actively document discovery, both from Intel and from third parties," Small said. However, that effort hit a large hurdle on Monday, whenÂ Intel admitted it had lost many internal e-mail recordsÂ related to the AMD case, making it impossible to collect them as evidence. On Wednesday, the court gave Intel a deadline of April 10 to turn over an explanation of its e-mail preservation plan, a list of correspondence between the people responsible for following it and its plan to restore the lost data. Another challenge for the class-action suit is Intel's motion to dismiss the entire case because it says customers were never harmed by increased prices. Instead, Intel says it used its dominant market position to compete with AMD by decreasing prices, Small said. Farnan said Wednesday he would rule on that motion by the end of March. Â
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By Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Jan. 31--An attorney for Advanced Micro Devices, longtime foe of chip giant Intel, said Tuesday that regulators are less aggressive in going after monopolistic practices in the United States in recent years.
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Worldwide&#160;lawsuits against Intel&#160;and&#160;four straight quarterly losses&#160;have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies, but the merger remains on track, according to industry analysts.AMD&#39;s acquisition of ATI&#160;for $5.4 billion, announced in July 2006 and completed one year ago Thursday, was viewed as a potent weapon in AMD&#39;s attempt to dent Intel&#39;s domination of the x86 processor market.The lawsuits against Intel and&#160;financial losses&#160;came at a critical time, when AMD&#39;s management needed help in integrating the ATI acquisition and making ATI employees understand AMD&#39;s culture, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.AMD filed antitrust lawsuits alleging monopolistic behavior against Intel in the U.S. and Japan, and lodged complaints with the European Commission, the Korean Fair Trade Commission and Japan Fair Trade Commission.The distraction was compounded by the departure of key executives, including David Orton, former president and CEO of ATI, who resigned as executive vice president of AMD in July after only 10 months.AMD didn&#39;t have any internal problems, Peddie said, and Orton left on his own accord. &quot;A little redundancy will always occur in all organizations. It&#39;s not surprising to see people shift,&quot; Peddie said. However, outside speculation about the departure may have distracted AMD during the integration, he said.AMD also took an acquisition-related charge of $76 million, or $0.14 per share, in the third quarter of 2007 ending Sept. 29. That added to the quarterly net loss of $396 million.Despite the distractions, AMD is pulling its resources together to ensure the ATI merger goes smoothly.&quot;The merger has allowed AMD to merge its plans with ATI, which were very similar prior to the acquisition.&quot; Peddie said. Both companies wanted to amalgamate the CPU with the graphics processor, and the acquisition puts them in a position to do so.A successful merger could help AMD reach profitability in a few quarters and position it for success in the future, wrote Doug Freedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, in a research report.&quot;We believe ATI is turning the corner, which is likely material to AMD&#39;s quest for profitability,&quot; Freedman wrote.The acquisition of ATI hasn&#39;t shown an immediate benefit, but could help&#160;AMD in the long term&#160;when the company&#39;s &quot;Fusion&quot; project comes to fruition, Peddie said. Fusion is the code name for is AMD&#39;s next-generation processor design that is expected to combine high-performance graphics and CPU processing on a single die. The project was announced when the merger was completed. AMD is not prepared to talk about Fusion yet, but it is intended to bring the cost of PCs down and reduce power consumption, Peddie said.AMD also announced the &quot;Spider&quot; platform, which will include AMD&#39;s upcoming Phenom chips and high-end graphics processors to provide users with the &quot;ultimate visual experience&quot; in computing, said Dirk Meyer, AMD&#39;s president and chief operating officer, on the company&#39;s third-quarter earnings call last week.With all the attention focused on Phenom and Spider, ATI&#39;s involvement in other businesses gets sidetracked, said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. AMD&#39;s ATI unit is a big player in supplying graphics to consumer electronics, set-top boxes and gaming consoles, Hester said. ATI supplies graphics processing units (GPUs) for Microsoft&#39;s Xbox 360 and Nintendo&#39;s Wii consoles, Hester said.&quot;Discrete GPUs will continue to be a good business for us,&quot; Hester said. AMD&#39;s graphics segment revenue grew 29 percent to $252 million sequentially, driven by the success of the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors.However, ATI&#39;s market share in the discrete graphics market has been hit by manufacturing problems and bad timing in bringing chips to market, Peddie said. Competitors such as Nvidia and Silicon Integrated Systems stepped up by shipping graphics chips on a timely basis, taking market share away from ATI.&quot;Market share could begin to swing back towards ATI even if it introduced simply comparable products to Nvidia in the near-term,&quot; wrote Doug Freedman in a research report. ATI&#39;s RV670 graphics card is competitive in the mainstream market with current Nvidia products, Freedman wrote.But AMD still has work to do to make the merger a success. Its biggest threat remains Intel, which maintains a stranglehold on the chip market.&quot;AMD must rebuild its brand value in the enthusiast market in order to garner better mainstream adoption and consumer recognition,&quot; Freedman wrote.
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Speaking yesterday, AMD EVP Tom McCoy said that he believes the US Government has been lax in its antitrust enforcement in recent months. As an example, McCoy re-ignited an old quarrel with Intel - part of its federal antitrust complaint that hasn't been addressed recently, especially in the midst of allegations against Intel's conduct in Germany.
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Intel Corp., the world's largest semiconductor company, was charged with violating South Korean antitrust laws, the company and regulators said Tuesday.
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Judge Joseph Farnan ruled this afternoon that AMD may seek reconsideration for its claim that Intel's allegedly anti-competitive conduct outside the U.S. directly impacts AMD's business inside the U.S. The claim is key to AMD's case against Intel.
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Wisconsin silicon heads The patent defense arm of the University of Wisconsin hit Intel with a lawsuit this week, claiming abuse of intellectual property related to parallel processing.â¦
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New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating possible violations of state and federal antitrust laws by Intel Corp., the world's largest manufacturer of computer microprocessors.
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Making the most of the single avenue of exploration US Federal District Judge Joseph A. Farnan left open last September, AMD is proceeding in its antitrust suit against Intel by arguing that nothing in the judge's most recent order explicitly prevents it from discovering evidence of misconduct.
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Chipmaking giant Intel Corporation believes that its future lies in dual-core chips. Speaking at last weekâs Intel Developer Forum here, Intel President and COO Paul Otellini
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N.Y. state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating possible violations of state and federal antitrust laws by Intel. The company says it hasn't broken any laws and blames the legal moves on competitor AMD.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has subpoenaed Advanced Micro DevicesÂ as part of an antitrust investigation into the market for graphics processors and graphics cards, AMD said Thursday. AMD recently entered the graphics chip business with itsÂ acquisition of ATI Technologies, which was finalized last month. The DOJ has not made any allegations against AMD or ATI, and AMD intends to cooperate with the investigation, it said. While the DOJ hasn't said specifically what it is investigating, one industry analyst speculated that the case could be about price fixing. The DOJ has alreadyÂ charged a number of chip companiesÂ in the DRAMÂ memory chip market for price fixing, and isÂ investigating severalÂ in the SRAM (Static RAM) chip market. "If the DOJ wanted to, it could just go down every line in the semiconductor industry and find the same issue," said Gartner analyst Richard Gordon. That's because there are a relatively few number of suppliers in the chip industry and an open flow of communication between competitors and customers, who may not define price fixing the same way the DOJ does, he said. The investigations are unlikely to benefit end users, according to Gordon. Historically, prices in the chip industry have gone up and down based on supply and demand and he doubts that such investigations will result in lower pricing. A spokeswoman for AMD in Europe, Hollis Krym, said she did not know if the investigation has a broad scope and includes other graphics chip companies or if it is in the context of the ATI acquisition. U.S. antitrust authorities have already approved AMD's merger with ATI. In the DRAM market, the DOJ has charged Samsung Electronics, Hynix Semiconductor America, Elpida Memory, and Infineon TechnologiesÂ with price fixing and sentenced the companies to pay multi-million dollar fines. Sony, Cypress Semiconductor, and the U.S. arms of Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung Electronics, and Toshiba have all been asked to turn over information to the DOJ for an investigation into SRAM price fixing.
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All Markt up AMD vs Intel The EC's anti-trust probe of Intel is growing and taking on a German flavor.â¦
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The South Korean business daily Maeil has confirmed that the country's Fair Trade Commission has not only concluded its antitrust investigation against Intel, but has filed a statement of objections against the CPU maker. This after some US press sources had taken the headline of Korea's story, "Korea Closes Intel Investigation," too literally.
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(InfoWorld) - The former engineering major in me got a nice surprise Tuesday afternoon when Intel's Gordon Moore (that's right, the guy behind The Law) spoke at the Intel Developer Forum Tuesday. Tech Nation's Moira Gunn hosted an hour-long conversation with Moore, and while I'm not usually one to go all weak-kneed at the sight of tech-industry giants, I have to admit that the father of Moore's Law got me going. Moore shared his thoughts on more than 40 years in the semiconductor industry and really helped bring into focus exactly how far we've come. The entire conversation will be available as a webcast shortly, but here are a few of my favorite tidbits: * On what the world would look like today if the integrated circuits Moore helped develop hadn't taken off, and computers were still built from individual transistors and components: There was an early projection by one of the few companies making transistors that eventually they could get the cost of a transistor down to 68 cents. Well, the IC did take off, and "today you buy them for 10 picobucks!" * Intel wasn't close to the first choice as a name for the company. It was initially called Moore-Noyce Electronics and a nice punny little name they used to initially incorporate the firm, but they ran through five or six candidates for a real name before they got Intel cleared as a trademark. Apparently it used to be standard procedure to clear such names in New York and California and assume that that got you the rest of the U.S. Of course, Moore said, "Then we ended up having to buy 'Intel' from a hotel company in the Midwest." Score one for the flyover states. * On innovation in general: "The most exciting things are usually in the interfaces, and there's lots of exciting stuff going on [now] in the interface between computers and biology." * Finally, what was Moore excited about for the next decades of technology? "We're going to get to the point where computers have really good language recognition ... where you interact with your computer the way you interact with your colleagues." Gordon, I can't wait. PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate