It was surreal listening to Intel defend itself against the EC's fine last week. The two sides were just miles apart. It was a sort of 'Yes you did; No I didn't' type of ding-dong.
"The decision was based on allegations that were just not true" said Intel CEO Paul Otellini, "we don't do these kind of things. All the evidence was not reviewed or not included into the case."
Are we to believe that the EC, after a nine year investigation, could get it totally wrong?
Intel's general counsel, Bruce Sewell, said: "Intel has never required a customer to agree not to buy from AMD in order to obtain a discount, nor raised a customer's prices when it decided to buy from AMD."
But the crux of the EC's case was that Intel made its rebates to customers conditional on the customers only buying a certain proportion of AMD chips.
Can the EC have got that so wrong?
The EC's Neelie Kroes said she had 'specific, documented' evidence that Intel had paid a manufacturer to delay the launch of an AMD PC.
"I can absolutely and categorically deny it and I do deny it", said Sewell.
Curiously, Otellini went on to say: "One thing the EU can't do is repeal
No one said it would, and no one thinks that Intel brought down the cost of computing - it would have come down that much by normal Moore's Law effects - while Wintel may well have stopped it falling further, faster.
Then Otellini got sniffy about Kroes' little joke that the 'Sponsors of Tomorrow' theme of Intel's new advertising campaign should read 'Sponsors of the European taxpayer'.
Not a joking matter, was Otellini's view.
The parties are so far apart it all boils down to a single issue. Who do you believe: A good Dutch girl or a
I find it interesting that what Intel is denying doing is not what they were accused of and penalized for: "Intel has never required a customer to agree not to buy from AMD in order to obtain a discount, nor raised a customer's prices when it decided to buy from AMD."
This was not about rebates, no matter how long or often Intel tries to cast it that way. It was basically about a reverse Payola scheme at the OEMs and, importantly, in the retail channels. Remember this all happened when AMD64 CPUs were spanking P4s but again, Intel tries to cast it in a different, more current timeframe.
All I can say is read the AMD-Intel_Full_Complaint.pdf filed in the U.S. and see what you think - dirty tricks?... no doubt. AMD whingeing?... probably understandably I think. Read what a smallish OEM said publicly in the appropriate timeframe: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-145081.html. Someone at HP told the same story, in particular about allocations, but he/she may not be around at HP any longer.
The sad thing is that AMD can never recover its losses from the blow of being "excluded". We can only guess at how much progress AMD would have made in its designs and manufacturing if it had been allowed to get its ROI from its clearly superior products in 2003-2006.
Scunnerous, that's another excellent point that Intel's clever marketing guys are protesting their innocence of actions which they haven't been accused of. But that's the weasselly nature of the marketing art. It's not an approach which cuts much ice with anti-trust regulators from Tokyo to Seoul to Brussels. I see the CNET poll came out with a majority for the view fhat Intel abused its dominant market posiiton and i suspect that's what most industry people think. As you say, how different the x86 market might now be had AMD not suffered its 'lost ROI'.