Submitted by Intel and main (and only?) rival AMD have long been embroiled in legal battles regarding antitrust and patent issues. On top of that, antitrust regulators all over the world are investigating Intel for possible antitrust violations, so it looks like Intel needed to close off at least one flank: the company has reached a settlement with AMD, ending all legal disputes between the two chip makers. Intel will pay 1.25 billion USD to AMD.
The settlement encompasses several things. First of all, it ends all patent and antitrust disputes between the two chip companies, who together supply almost the entire PC industry with processors. AMD will also withdraw all of its regulatory complaints, worldwide. Intel will pay 1.25 billion USD to AMD. Also part of the settlement is a new 5 year cross licensing agreement.
In a joint statement, the two companies said: “While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.”
“We look forward to healthy competition with the mutual respect one would expect between world class competitors,” said AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer in a conference call about the settlement.
Shares of both companies jumped right after the news. The legal disputes created a lot of uncertainty, and that’s not something you want during an economic crisis. While Intel nor AMD speak of admissions of guilt, the fact that Intel is paying up kind of indicates that it knows it’s been in the wrong.
Looks like the Chipzilla fanboys will be eating crow for now.
atleast for the next 5 years.
I give it 3 years tops.
My guess is both will try to enter the small device market (like cell phones) and get caught up in legal battles again. The want of money caused the problems and money can only fix them for so long…..
This is a drop in the bucket compared to Intel’s past actions. When the original Athlons were eating the P4’s lunch I was baffled why more OEM’s were not jumping on them. Then when they had the mem controller on chip they were way ahead of Intel and still their market share languished. I don’t think we will ever know how many back room deals and arm twistings went on. I am not delusional that AMD is a bunch of angels but this agreement deal stinks. AMD is on the ropes and desperate for cash. Intel gets to walk away from all litigation with what is really a small fine.
memory controller on chip didn’t do much against Core 2 Duo, C2D was performing better.
Core i5 and i7 are also performing better than anything AMD has right now too.
Pre Core Duo AMD had really nice performing products beating Intel in performance and price, but one thing that Intel has always had has been graceful overheating adding extra stability and less smoke when a fan dies, this likely also interested OEMs over pure performance.
Funny, I didn’t notice the word “Core” anywhere in his post, though “When the original Athlons were eating the P4’s lunch” is a pretty clear indicator of time-scale.
In any case, this seems a reasonable deal for AMD. Perhaps the settlement doesn’t seem large in terms of SALES, but in terms of profits they reasonably could have made, it doesn’t seem far off. Realistically, they didn’t have the fab capacity to have completely turned the table on Intel, certainly not before Core/Core2 showed up.
And don’t believe Intel is sweating any less over it’s ever growing number of anti-trust cases.
First the on die memory controller came way before core class cpu’s. And if amd made their way with oems and actuly earned som money mabye they could have competed better against the core class cpus.
And i have yet to see a athlon going up in smoke becus a fan died. If the whole cpu sink fell of then yes it would die the computer store i worked at sold mostly athlon t-bird systems and we did not have a singel computer returned becus the cpu went up in smoke.
If you cant attache the cpu sink so it wont fall of i dont know how you do it.
‘Cause you know, AMD totally did not have an on-chip sensor, and had no method of protection that would keep the chip from frying itself. And I totally did NOT find out that it worked the hard way, with a Shuttle AK35GT2, by applying Arctic Silver to the plastic sheet protecting the bottom of a brand new SK-7 heatsink. No sirree, didn’t happen (ironically, that was why I got an Athlon XP in the first place, having negligently fried my old Duron, and managed then to test it out before my first successful POST
).
Edited 2009-11-14 06:51 UTC
So what yor saying is that you
1 did not do your homework and bougth a motherboard without a heat sensor.
(our shop did it’s homework and only sold boards with a sensor underneath the cpu)
2 did not follow simple instuctions on how to mount the cpu cooler
And the result was that you fried your computer and now somehow it’s amds fault.
After 22 blows to the groin, 55 blows to the head and numerous take downs. AMD has decided to end their fight with Intel. We asked H. Ruindz from AMD for a comment, all he had to say was “Uncle!”
I’d like to think that this is only a drop in the ocean for all the damage that Intel has done to poor old AMD. I mean, it wasn’t until the last 8 or so years that you could walk into a store and buy a computer that had an AMD chip in it. I remember what a big deal it was when places like Walmart and Best Buy started carrying the first “budget” low end PC’s that had AMD chips in them. They had to claw and beg their way into Gateway and Dell and the like.
I’m sure AMD was just hurting for money at the moment, but at least this means an admission of guilt on Intel’s side. If only Microsoft would admit to their competition that they pulled the same underhanded OEM tactics. Oh wait…Microsoft has no competition…
Oh, wait, that “oh, wait” trick is lame.
How old are you? High school? College? Microsoft signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice in 1994 to end the practice of per-processing licensing; where, the company tied the price of the operating system to every processor sold by that OEM, which made it difficult or impossible for competitors to ship their offerings on those same machines (since the OEM was paying Microsoft, regardless). How much more of an “admission of guilt” would you like?
Edited 2009-11-13 01:16 UTC
This seems to be an attempt at unifying the producers of x86’s so that the ARM cannot take over the roost as top performing processor. ARM is a much smaller core in terms of the numbers of transistors and could fit more cores per die if they had the latest in production technology.
Personally I think the only thing floating x86’s boat is Windows. The core is overbloated with years of backward compatibility.
MacOSX is not bound to a hardware platform in that they can port theirs to any processor they want, as has been demonstrated when they came out with iPhone and iPod Touch. Linux has the ARM platform all but sewn up also and only the desktop Linux models still run x86 for the most part.
Maybe nVidia is thinking the right way by not making an x86. If they use their fabs to produce a successor to the Cortex A9 ARM chips, they could shift the balance against Intel and Windows both by allowing Mac and Linux to jump ship from x86.
Despite my well-performing (!) AMD stocks, that’s a sight I’d be excited to see.
nonsense- windows isnt really bound to its hardware any more or less than osx. apple chose to maintain its platform on several architectures just like windows ran on dec alpha, mips, itanium and powerpc. its a matter of choice.
/stone
Edited 2009-11-13 08:23 UTC
So where are all the non-x86 Windows apps?
Its got a lot more to do with the apps actually.
FYI: nVidia, much like ARM, have no manufacturing facilities. They are purely design companies.
That is why you have TI, Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple and a bunch of others licensing/manufacturing ARM chips. And you can’t buy an nVidia nVidia GeForce 280, but something like (MSI,PoV) nVidia Geforce 280.
True, but since ATI spun off its wafer fabrication as a separate company they could have made things very difficult for Intel if they sided with nVidia on the processor market.
Re: 40 nM processes, I think Intel’s down to about 35 nM processes or smaller by now. It’s close but may not be close enough.
40nm seems awfully close to the latest, to me. I’m itching for 4-way A9-based notebooks w/ good X support (when you can’t swap out the video chip, X support kills old x86 hardware’s usefulness).
So is this an early April Fools day joke…..