Intel Loses Appeal Of $1.4B EU Fine

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Something tells me this is headed back to court.

U.S. chipmaker Intel lost on Thursday its challenge against a record 1.06 billion euro ($1.44 billion) European Union fine handed down five years ago, as Europe's second highest court said regulators did not act too harshly.
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the problem is that the damage has already been done. by forcing AMD not necessarily into a corner, but at least into an unfavorable position, they made a long-term profit certainly larger than 1 bn euros. therefore, this kind of behavior can only be contained with really stupidly high fines so that it doesn't pay anymore to gain an unfair advantage by leveraging your market position. it's still pocket change considering what they gained by doing so.
 
I agree with you, but the saddest part is that they have made such a huge amount of money since, it has still paid massively to do it and continues to do so.
We lost out and AMD are not what they could have been.

Intel got a small part of what they deserve.

ps I'm not an AMD fanboy, my last AMD chip was an Athlon 64.
 
The European Commission in its 2009 decision said Intel tried to thwart rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) by giving rebates to PC makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard Co, NEC and Lenovo for buying most of their computer chips from Intel.

The EU competition authority said Intel also paid German retail chain Media Saturn Holding to stock only computers with its chips.
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I do not see where the problem is here. Ya it sucks to be cornered out of a market, but as far as I can see each company would have the freedom to make the choices they made. If Intel wants to lower their profit margin per part I see that as being their choice. If a retailer wants to sign an exclusive agreement with a vendor I see that as being that companies choice.

AMD lost ground because Intel is a beast and has the cash flow. Intel is diverse and has the capability to set standards (and in turn reap the royalties of those standards). AMD got lucky because Intel got cocky about Netburst and RAMBUS and sat on it for too long. The only thing that probably saved AMD from being crushed completely was their 64 bit implementation that allowed them to strong arm Intel.
 
To me, lawsuits like this, seem like the court is saying you have a "right to success". Not the right to try to be successful, but a guarantee of success by forcing others to keep you relevant.
 
64 bit extension and true dualcore with interconnect.

Not sure if it helped but they also moved the memory controller onto the CPU from the Northbridge before Intel did.
 
westrock2000 said:
AMD lost ground because Intel is a beast and has the cash flow.
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AMD only really gained ground in the first place due to circumstance.

AMD launched the K8 architecture, which was a very good advancement over both AMD and Intel's previous-gen parts.
Intel missteped and launched the Netburst architecture, which didn't initially offer significant advancements over their older products.

Intel then went and tried to run with this mistake for years, while AMD made incremental improvements to K8. This allowed AMD to get into a fairly good position for an extended period of time.

Had intel not attempted Netburst, it's likely AMD wouldn't have ever been a real contender.
 
And then we'd have seen the rise of Cyrix!!!!!

hehehehe
 
My questions is, how can or will this helps AMD?

Also, 1 billion is way to low for the damage done.
 
I think people exclude the interests of the OEMs here ... most of them did not like maintaining two supply chains ... they maintained AMD lines and Intel lines during AMDs peak but AMDs delivery was unreliable and the OEMs had razor thin profit margins so they were very interested in things that added to their bottom lines (like the Intel rebates)

Ultimately AMD cut their own throat ... they got to enjoy the $1000 chip market (just like Intel had) but they failed to invest it into R&D or to improve their delivery capacity ... that did as much as anything to keep them down ... They got enormous profit and benefit from their NexGen purchase (since that is what gave them the profitable Athlon lines) but they didn't have enough other tricks in their bags and Intel is kind of like the line from Tora, Tora, Tora ("I fear we have awoken a giant and filled him with a terrible resolve")
 
It's useless to speculate about AMD as long as Intel is shown to use unfair business practices against it. If your competition bullys you out of the market you have no money to invest for R&D anymore which is the start of a downward spiral.

We the consumers lose. With no competition development slows down and prices hike up. This is why we also keep paying (correction: you keep paying) Microsoft over inflated prices for their products and no wide spread competition is available. Microsoft has been on trial for pulling the same sort of shit Intel did.
 
Intel did not develop the core 2 duo, they bought it when they purchased a small Israeli company. They developed it into a terrific CPU though.
 
phred15 said:
Intel did not develop the core 2 duo, they bought it when they purchased a small Israeli company. They developed it into a terrific CPU though.
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Wasn't this company by Intel, though?
 
Intel achieved its present market position by crushing every would-be competitor who came along--there were several of them aside from AMD. AMD is the *only* x86 cpu manufacturer whom Intel tried but failed to crush--and Intel pulled every trick in the book to see that happen. Back when the K7 began shipping in ~1999, Intel overtly threatened every motherboard OEM in the world with shortages and higher prices for a number of things *unless* they dropped their K7-support plans. That's all a matter of record--months after motherboard OEMs started shipping K7 boards you couldn't find mention of them on the normal company web sites, etc. Basically, the motherboard OEMs at last collectively gave Intel the middle finger and openly began selling and advertising AMD-supporting products, even though Intel was threatening to withhold bus licenses and supply and lots of other things. AMD triumphed despite everything Intel could throw at them--and the company is *still* doing it, amazingly enough. To support its massive and massively expensive FAB operations, Intel has to utterly dominate in certain chip markets--the gpu market, where AMD and nVidia dominate Intel in terms of performance and value, is not one of them. If not for the K7 and the A64, no telling where Intel cpus would be today....*shudder*....;)
 
MrGuvernment said:
To which they got comfortable and arrogant and did nothing for innovation and then Intel came out with the Core Duo line and it has been history ever since and AMD has done very little to take back the crown..
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Actually it started with the Pentium M CPUs. ;)
 
dgz said:
Wasn't this company by Intel, though?
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By Intel? It is buy by Intel. I imagine any company that developed any kind of a CPU got bought by Intel. I guess Cyrix and AMD got started too early for Intel to buy them out. Didn't they have Intel licensees to make x86 chips?
 
phred15 said:
By Intel? It is buy by Intel. I imagine any company that developed any kind of a CPU got bought by Intel. I guess Cyrix and AMD got started too early for Intel to buy them out. Didn't they have Intel licensees to make x86 chips?
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Intel does not "buy everyone" ... they didn't (nor could they have, due to anti-trust regulations) buy NexGen (and it was NexGen that saved AMD) ... AMD's technology was hardly industry leading until they acquired NexGen ... The Core technology was not a new technology as much as a redesign (do over if you will) going back to the 386/486 mobile chip designs (as others have noted) ... it was a research group in Israel that led that effort as a side project and it later became Intel's primary product line
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The EU should increase the fine by 10x.
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To what purpose ... AMD doesn't get any of the money ... does the USA really need to continue to subsidize the failing EU ... the EU doesn't care anymore about AMD than Intel but they certainly never pass up an opportunity to fine American companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Apple :mad:
 
kbrickley said:
To what purpose ... AMD doesn't get any of the money ... does the USA really need to continue to subsidize the failing EU ... the EU doesn't care anymore about AMD than Intel but they certainly never pass up an opportunity to fine American companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Apple :mad:
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The FTC fined them, too.

Intel clearly broke the law. That's not acceptable behavior, and it's had clear negative consequences for consumers. People complain about there not being competition anymore, but even back in the netburst days Intel was so dominant that they could effectively ignore the competition. You didn't see Intel rush out any serious improvements to the Pentium 4 even though it was literally beaten across the board by AMD's products. It was cheaper just to keep AMD out of the market. It amazes me when I see people say baseless things like 'AMD's delivery was unreliable' when we know that Intel was using it's position to force OEM's to buy 95-100% of their chips from Intel, delay AMD products, and limit the product categories in which AMD products could be used, among other things.

One of the roles of government is to create the rules and conditions in which companies are allowed to operate. If the fines for ignoring those rules are so low that they can effectively be written off as 'the cost of doing business' (and you can continue to litigate years later when you clearly broke the law) then the fines need to be increased substantially. I said 10x, and even that probably isn't nearly enough.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The FTC fined them, too.

Intel clearly broke the law. That's not acceptable behavior, and it's had clear negative consequences for consumers. People complain about there not being competition anymore, but even back in the netburst days Intel was so dominant that they could effectively ignore the competition. You didn't see Intel rush out any serious improvements to the Pentium 4 even though it was literally beaten across the board by AMD's products. It was cheaper just to keep AMD out of the market. It amazes me when I see people say baseless things like 'AMD's delivery was unreliable' when we know that Intel was using it's position to force OEM's to buy 95-100% of their chips from Intel, delay AMD products, and limit the product categories in which AMD products could be used, among other things.

One of the roles of government is to create the rules and conditions in which companies are allowed to operate. If the fines for ignoring those rules are so low that they can effectively be written off as 'the cost of doing business' (and you can continue to litigate years later when you clearly broke the law) then the fines need to be increased substantially. I said 10x, and even that probably isn't nearly enough.
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Well, then they should give the fine to the impacted companies or rebate it to the consumers ... my question is how a large payment made to a government bureaucracy benefits the consumer ... if the payment was made directly to AMD or refunded to the impacted companies like Dell then I would support a larger fine ... giving more money to government entities doesn't benefit the economy or the consumer (and that is why I asked to what purpose a 10X payment to the coffers of the EU is beneficial) ;)
 
kbrickley said:
Well, then they should give the fine to the impacted companies or rebate it to the consumers ... my question is how a large payment made to a government bureaucracy benefits the consumer ... if the payment was made directly to AMD or refunded to the impacted companies like Dell then I would support a larger fine ... giving more money to government entities doesn't benefit the economy or the consumer (and that is why I asked to what purpose a 10X payment to the coffers of the EU is beneficial) ;)
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Oversight costs money. If you get a parking ticket should a portion of the money be redistributed to the people you inconvenienced by parking illegally? In a perfect world, maybe, but that's not a realistic way of dealing with the situation in most cases.
 
kbrickley said:
Well, then they should give the fine to the impacted companies or rebate it to the consumers ... my question is how a large payment made to a government bureaucracy benefits the consumer
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This is one of the simplest concepts of justice people. If you break the law, there's supposed to be consequences. If you PROFIT by breaking the law, the consequences should be MORE than what your profit was, otherwise it's no deterrent.

As for how this helps consumers, besides establishing law and order, a generally beneficial concept for humanity, it could damage Intel enough to level the playing field more and spur more competition, and moreover, act as a precedent to discourage law-breaking behavior from it again or from other companies. It's usually not great for consumers when large corporations break the law.
 
phred15 said:
Intel did not develop the core 2 duo, they bought it when they purchased a small Israeli company. They developed it into a terrific CPU though.
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Intel has had a design team in Israel since the early 1970s. Mooly Eden headed the Pentium M and Conroe projects for Intel and he's been an Intel employee since the early 1980s.

You may be confusing some other acquisitions Intel got over the years, but none of those had anything to do with Conroe, which traces its roots to Banias.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The FTC fined them, too.
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Neither of the 2 recent (1990s, 2000s) FTC investigations involved fines (one was dumped by the W Bush administration, and the other was settled without fines). You may be thinking of the small fines by Japan and Korea, or the NY state AG action which led to Intel paying AMD $1B to drop all complaints.

EUC rules have a much lesser threshold for what's considered anti-competitive. The EU's standard is based on a flexible definition of "dominance" (noteworthy because it somehow excludes the same behavior that is "wrong" for others but OK for EU based companies). Being a hard competitor isn't illegal in the US or most of the world outside of the EU. Rebates, discounts based on quantity, co-marketing dollars, etc are still used by many large companies worldwide. In the EU however, doing that while being a "dominant player" leads to large fines and is why it led to such an "usual" government levied fine.

Constant whining after AMD made innumerable business mistakes is easy though. So carry on. :p
 
As long as Intel keeps playing dirty I'll keep buying from the competition. I may very well cancel my Surface Pro 3 pre-order too. Act classy not trashy Intel.
 
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