Intel might have to share documents in AMD case
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Intel should have to share documents that could show it used monopolistic practices to force overseas PC vendors and retailers to shun Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chips, the special master to a U.S. federal court recommended Friday.
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CSI Mountain View Intel's plan to unveil its copy of AMD's Hypertransport technology at next month's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) has been spoiled by a rather thorough analyst.â¦
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Amid further delays of AMD&#39;s quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.AMD preempted the analyst meeting with the announcement Wednesday that it plans to take a material charge for impaired goodwill from its US$5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI. But AMD didn&#39;t say how big that charge will be, promising to announce the amount within four days -- a span of time that implies details of the charge will be revealed after the analyst meeting.Goodwill is a financial term that describes the difference between the price that one company paid to acquire another and the net value of the assets that it acquires. This difference, or goodwill, reflects the intangibles that a company acquires, such as the reputation and intellectual property of the acquired company.AMD initially recorded goodwill of $3.22 billion from the acquisition of ATI. That was reduced to $3.17 billion at the end of September, primarily due to changes in income-tax liabilities recorded by the company. AMD&#39;s decision to write off a significant portion of this goodwill is a recognition that ATI is no longer worth the price it paid last year.The expected charge further dims AMD&#39;s gloomy financial outlook. The company has so far lost $1.6 billion this year on sales of $4.2 billion. By comparison, AMD recorded a $410 million profit on sales of $3.9 billion during the first nine months of 2006. At the same time, AMD borrowed heavily this year to keep its operations moving, issuing $3.7 billion in notes that are convertible into company shares.AMD received a further boost last month with a $608 million investment from a company owned by the Abu Dhabi government, but the company still faces significant challenges.Those challenges are reflected in the decline of AMD&#39;s gross margin since last year, partly as a result of the ATI acquisition, which brought lower-margin products into AMD&#39;s lineup, but also because server chips represented a lower percentage of the company&#39;s microprocessor sales. Server chips are generally more expensive and have higher margins than processors used in desktops and notebooks, and strong sales of server chips would give a badly needed boost to AMD&#39;s financial situation.The problem is that AMD&#39;s latest server chip, the Quad-Core Opteron formerly known as&#160;Barecelona has been repeatedly delayed,&#160;giving rival Intel an opening to expand sales of its own server chips at AMD&#39;s expense.After recently discovering&#160;a bug in the Quad-Core Opteron that stopped shipments of the chip, AMD now expects the processor, launched in September, to finally ship in large volumes sometime during the first quarter of 2008. That means the Quad-Core Opteron might not be available to most customers until March, six months after its launch and more than one year after the first pre-production samples of the chip were made available to server makers.While analysts will be looking for more detailed guidance on when AMD expects to ship Quad-Core Opteron chips in volume, they will also be looking for information on the next version of the Quad-Core Opteron, called Shanghai. AMD promised to ship Shanghai during the middle of 2008, but the company has yet to produce working samples of the chip.&quot;We will have initial samples also in January. I&#39;m fairly confident that those puppies are going to boot, and then we can have a follow-up conference call and I&#39;ll tell you, &#39;The sucker is booting,&#39;&quot; said Mario Rivas, the executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group, responding to a question about Shanghai during a recent interview with CRN.Whether that means AMD will release Shanghai in mid-2008 as promised remains to be seen.Shanghai is a 45-nanometer &quot;shrink&quot; of the problematic Barcelona chip, which is produced using a 65-nanometer process. These numbers represent the average size of the smallest feature that can be created on a chip, and smaller is generally considered better.Moving to a more advanced production process offers chip makers several benefits, such as reducing unit production costs by making the chip smaller or adding more features, such as additional on-chip cache. But the move to a more advanced process also carries risks, such as the possibility of lower production yields that can result in limited availability or chips that run at lower clock speeds than expected.Along with these issues looming over AMD, there are questions about the future of Hector Ruiz, the company&#39;s CEO and chairman. As head of the company, Ruiz ultimately bears responsibility for the company&#39;s recent performance problems and the impending write down of goodwill from the ATI acquisition. For months, there has been speculation within the industry that Ruiz would be forced to step down from his current position.However, that&#39;s unlikely to happen, according to a Reuters report citing comments made by Ruiz in a television interview to be aired by CNBC Europe later today. During that interview, Ruiz named AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer as his successor, but scotched speculation he plans to step down next year, the report said.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) may yet team up with another chip maker for the construction of a semiconductor fabrication plant (fab) to expand its manufacturing capacity for microprocessors, despite shelving similar plans in 2003, according to a senior company executive.
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Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are revving up for what they see as the next big step in the evolution of x86 processorsâthe introduction of dual processing cores.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel may have lost some internal e-mails that the company is required to produce in aÂ lawsuitÂ brought against it by Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD), lawyers for the company said Monday. In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan Jr., one of Intel's lawyers revealed that some internal e-mails were missing, despite the company's efforts to preserve documents related to the case. "Intel is taking this matter very seriously. It very much regrets this happened," wrote Richard Horowitz, a partner at Potter, Anderson & Corroon, which represents Intel. Horowitz blamed the possible loss of e-mails on human error. For instance, when Intel employees were instructed to retain e-mails on their hard drives, some employees did not move e-mails from their sent folder to the hard drives, assuming that the company's e-mail servers would preserve them. Instead, the e-mail servers regularly delete e-mails after a certain amount of time has passed, he said. Other employees wrongly assumed that Intel's IT department was automatically saving their e-mails, while some may not have saved all of their e-mails, Horowitz said. In addition, Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case, he said. The allegedly lost e-mails were generated "primarily" after AMD filed suit against Intel on June 27, 2005, but earlier e-mails could not be ruled out as among those missing, Horowitz said. In a related filing to the court, AMD blasted Intel's apparent failure to preserve the missing e-mails. "Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed," AMD said, noting that Intel continued to allow e-mails to be deleted from its servers after the lawsuit was filed. "Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong," AMD said. AMD and Intel are scheduled to discuss the document retention failures at a status meeting on March 7. AMD demanded in its letter to the court that Intel be required to give a full accounting of its document "preservation problems" no later than March 21. AMD's 2005 suit alleges that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to bolster a monopolistic position in the PC processor market. AMD claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including DellÂ and Sony, into using only Intel processors or discontinuing use or promotion of AMD products. The alleged threats include forcing manufacturers into exclusive relationships, or offering deep discounts or marketing subsidies in exchange for discontinuing the use of AMD products. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. The suit was based in part on the findings of a Japanese anti-trust investigation, which found in March 2005 that Intel had abused its market position to restrain competition in Japan's microprocessor market. Â
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(InfoWorld) - E-mail messages from some of Intel's most senior executives are among those that should have been preserved but were not after the chip-maker was sued for alleged antitrust violations by Advanced Micro Devices, according to a court transcript released by AMD. IntelÂ revealed last weekÂ that some internal e-mails that may be important to the case were missing as a result of errors. The transcript, from a status conference on March 7, indicates that Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and President and CEO Paul Otellini were among those not in compliance with the company's document retention policies. The executives apparently deleted the e-mail messages, including some to Intel's largest customers, because they were under the false impression that Intel was automatically backing up their e-mail, according to the transcript. "But the last category that I am very worried about is the senior management -- and I'm talking executive level Barrett and Otellini," said AMD attorney Linda Smith, according to the transcript. "This is the absolute top level. And these are the folks that, even if there's only a two-, three-, four-month gap, they're the major players who are communicating with the heads of other companies." E-mail messages from several hundred Intel employees have been requested by lawyers for AMD. Some employee e-mail was lost because workers failed to move messages from their "sent" folder into other folders and it was automatically deleted, while others were lost because Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case. Intel representatives in London declined to comment. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told the Wall Street Journal that the missing information represents "a small proportion of the tens of millions of pages of documents" that Intel will provide in the case. "There is no evidence whatsoever that any relevant e-mails or documents have been lost," he told the Journal. AMD filed its lawsuit against Intel and its Japanese subsidiary, Intel KK, in 2005, alleging that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to support its monopoly in the PC processor market. The lawsuit claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including Dell and Sony, into using only Intel processors and stopping the promotion of AMD products. Intel denies the charges. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. Â
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Intel's presentation at a conference next week appears set to confirm many rumored details of the chip's architecture and characteristics.
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In an announcement before semiconductor engineers in San Francisco this morning, AMD and IBM put forth proof of what could be their breakthrough process - their response to Intel in the race to reduction.  It could pull AMD back even with Intel by 2008, if Intel doesn't respond in the intervening months.
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The case against Intel's right to pay its channel clients for exclusivity has been a matter for a civil court. But if the New York Attorney General finds what he's looking for, the company could find the case against it both upgraded and multithreaded.
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Intel Corp. will look to a multicore future during the Fall Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco next week as it tries to leave behind a tumultuous year plagued by product delays and road map revisions.
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Another day, another investigation New York state is joining the growing line to probe Intel's paperwork over charges of anticompetitive behavior against chip rival AMD.â¦
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Company will break its promise to deliver a speedier chip, shifts focus to dual-core designs. Intel has confirmed its near-term plans for its desktop processors before it reaches the multicore era.
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AMD and Intel processor road maps for 2007 show both companies are on the move to address these issues.
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Both AMD and Intel are working on plans to integrate graphics-processing capabilities onto the same chip as the central processing unit (CPU), which could help deliver ultra-powerful chips as early as 2008.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is expected to unveil its most powerful desktop processors to date on Tuesday, a few days after rival Intel Corp. disclosed changes to its desktop processor road map.
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TechWeb - The processor&#39;s sweet spot will be in four-way servers, and midrange two-way servers, but AMD will need to show increased performance for the price if it wants to add customers, analysts suggest.