AMD Bites Back, Sues Intel - Leading But Not Selling?

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AMD’s Complaint is based on AMD technology being superior. Since it’s more innovative, Intel’s dominance must be sustained some way other than competing on performance alone. So, anticompetitive business practices deprive home and business consumers of superior chips. It sounds as if the former point is grounded a bit more solidly, but the latter will be quite difficult for AMD to back up. Even harder will be proving that the actions were illegal.

More and more over the past few years, AMD has been schooling Intel. Dual-core processors are a great (and recent) example. AMD demonstrated the first functioning dual-core last year and was planned far ahead of schedule. Earlier this year, Intel rushed their immature dual-cores to market first, but the chips were barely even yawn-worthy. AMD released theirs next and proved that they were significantly further ahead of their competition.

Also, look at 64-bit processors. Intel again pushed the first ones to market, the Itanium in 2001. It was expensive and incompatible with all former processors. If it had caught on, it would have secured AMD’s doom because the instruction set is not x86. Only Intel would have the right to use the instruction set, but instead the Itanium crashed and burned (making the processor hall of shame). Two years later, AMD released a 64-bit Opteron and Athlon that still uses the x86 instruction set and is backwards compatible with all current 32-bit programs. A few months later,Intel CEO Craig Barrett made the news saying, “We have no plans at this stage for a 64-bit address extension like theAMDdevice for the desktop.”Just last year, Intel announced that they would actually follow AMD on this course, but they have yet to release the chip that will replace their Itanium.

AMD also cites a few other advancements that Intel has followed, like breaking 1 GHz clock speed and using model numbers to gauge processor power. AMD has emerged as an industry leader. So, why does it have less than 10% of the processor market while Intel has 90%? There could be a few reasons. For example, the greatest product in the world can sell zero units if it doesn’t have proper promotion. Intel has advertised their processors heavily in all media, even including their own promotion in Dell commercials. Meanwhile, I have only seen an AMD ad on television once, right after the Athlon debuted five years ago.

However, AMD says that Intel is keeping them down with questionable business practices.

Next: AMD's Complaint Filing >>
 

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Comments On: AMD Bites Back, Sues Intel

· It looks like things have really been heating up since this article was published....    · ya, i lost respect for AMD. They get thier asses beaten to a pulp and instead of...    · Actually, last month was a record for AMD. It was the first month that they outsold...    · AMD Really has to stop whining about Intel's success, I no-longer have any respect...    · Yeah, it's kind of disgusting. I'd like them to stop whining, but it's not making me...    · well, no. professional sports would be amess. but in business jerks payother jerks...    · amd all the way!!!! hands down amd beats out intel in every benchmark right across...    · I think that if intel has done these alleged acts to beat out amd courts should rule...   >>> Post your comment now!