Intel found to be abusing market power in Japan

George Macdonald wrote:
As for Intel/AMD, you have a good point about the
symbiotic relationship: Intel is now in the strange,
never before seen, situation that they actually,
crucially need the cross-license agreement to survive
in the new x86 world - absolutely no question of living
without it. AMD has, of course, just as much need
and I wonder if they would even think about taking
civil legal action against Intel for their marketing
sins. Who knows what the "hidden" sections of the agreement,
http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.c...001.01.01.html
might contain about legal actions?

So you think there might be a kiss'n'make-up Socket U
that will run both AMD & Intel CPUs?

The importance of X-licence isn't new. For many years,
nobody would design something without a second-source of
all parts. Why has Dell (et al) never learned?

Now there just may be a new reason for X-lic.

-- Robert

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:55:01 GMT, Robert Redelmeier
wrote:

George Macdonald wrote:
As for Intel/AMD, you have a good point about the
symbiotic relationship: Intel is now in the strange,
never before seen, situation that they actually,
crucially need the cross-license agreement to survive
in the new x86 world - absolutely no question of living
without it. AMD has, of course, just as much need
and I wonder if they would even think about taking
civil legal action against Intel for their marketing
sins. Who knows what the "hidden" sections of the agreement,
http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.c...001.01.01.html
might contain about legal actions?

So you think there might be a kiss'n'make-up Socket U
that will run both AMD & Intel CPUs?

Intriguing thought but the "hidden" sections are hard to even guess at.
Could the Intel FSB, or CSI, be ruled out?shrug I'd sure like to know
what the royalty levels are that AMD is paying Intel though.

The importance of X-licence isn't new. For many years,
nobody would design something without a second-source of
all parts. Why has Dell (et al) never learned?

Well so far Dell is not suffering... are the others so incompetent? The
new AMD notebook chips could be the key... if they're any good. I am
absolutely convinced that Intel's enthusiasm for "platformization" based on
the "Centrino success" is a total misread. People don't buy notebooks
because of Centrino.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

George Macdonald wrote:
I'd sure like to know what the royalty levels are that AMD
is paying Intel though.

Who says the money is flowing in that direction?

AMD is probably paying Intel royalties on the EV [Alpha] bus.
AFAIK, full-design royalties run 4% of sales, partial usage
much less. I'd expect AMD to be paying 1% or less.

Well so far Dell is not suffering... are the others so incompetent?

Dell hasn't suffered so far because Intel has been nice to them.

The new AMD notebook chips could be the key... if they're any
good. I am absolutely convinced that Intel's enthusiasm for
"platformization" based on the "Centrino success" is a total
misread. People don't buy notebooks because of Centrino.

Well, Centrino probably has been a marketing success. Is your
corp-speak to English translator broken? "Centrino success"
means "mobile Pentium4 cratered". And the PentiumM CPU of
Centrino is a P6, much closer to an Athlon than a Pentium4.
I suspect that AMD has a few tricks [patents] Intel wants.

-- Robert

George Macdonald wrote:
As for Intel/AMD, you have a good point about the symbiotic relationship:
Intel is now in the strange, never before seen, situation that they
actually, crucially need the cross-license agreement to survive in the new
x86 world - absolutely no question of living without it. AMD has, of
course, just as much need and I wonder if they would even think about
taking civil legal action against Intel for their marketing sins.

Why does Intel absolutely need the cross-licensing agreement? The only
thing I can think of is that they'll need it for the access to the
x86-64, but what else?

Yousuf Khan

Robert Myers wrote:
It's really tangential from the point of the post, but it will be
fascinating to see whether intel (with it's symbiotic "competitor"
AMD) keeps its place of dominance against globalization and against
all recent history to the contrary. Looking to that recent history,
though, the place to look for new competition is not US companies.
Wonder where the "red flag" processor will be ten years from now.
Wonder where x86 will be ten years from now?

Yeah, exactly what my point was, the auto industry got reinvigorated
with globalization, and I expect that the next CPU powerhouse will be
from outside the US as well. My bets are on China producing the next
one. However the Europeans have some established chip companies that may
be able to grow depending on European government support. The Chinese
one will also require government support.

Oh another example from another industry. Boeing was headed for a global
passenger plane monopoly (Lockheed, MD, all got consolidated out), until
Airbus got some long-term European government support and took it on.

Yousuf Khan

George Macdonald wrote:
Did we completely dispense with China? I don't remember the thread
and I can't find it.


To do with cultural, social, economic err, immaturity?... an "adolescent"
society is what I seem to recall you used - no? At any rate I don't see
them as a big threat - they've been put in their place on their Wi-Fi rogue
"standard"... fortunately for them in the long run. Basically they've
shown themsleves to be pretty adept at buggering up a good thing with weird
socio-political moves.

Well, I don't know about how adolescent of a society they are. They've
shown themselves to be quite mature at growing their economy with adept
management, while their fellow Communist state, the Russians, have known
nothing but bad management until now.


I don't want to rouse sleeping dogs here, but I
just wish to hell they'd get on with oil exploration & production, instead
of keeping in in the bank.... err, ground.

Oh don't you worry, we up here in Canuckistan have as much oil locked up
in our little tar sands as the entire global reserve (or something like
that). Once the price of oil gets to a certain level (fast approaching
now), we'll actually be able to extract it economically for you guys. :-)

Whatever the contract says, I'd be bug-eyed to see AMD go after Intel
in court. It would make as much sense as a New York or Chicago
gangland turf war. Why would anybody want to mess with a good deal,
especially now that AMD looks much less insecure than it once did?
AMD may not really want to mess with Dell, either, since I suspect
that the concessions that Intel offers there make it a pretty
unattractive customer.


I agree - a court case would be a horrible affair with only losers,
financially and morally, in the end.

So you're expecting an out of court settlement between the two? I can't
see AMD even having the option of keeping this out of the civil system,
once the indictment is upheld. AMD has been telling governments around
the world how much Intel is keeping it out of the markets. Here once a
government finally agrees, it's just going to shut up about it?

Yousuf Khan

George Macdonald wrote:
The importance of X-licence isn't new. For many years,
nobody would design something without a second-source of
all parts. Why has Dell (et al) never learned?


Well so far Dell is not suffering... are the others so incompetent?

Yeah, the second-source model is a relic of ancient times, when silicon
output was a relative trickle compared to now. The mass production era
of IC production was barely underway when IBM decided that Intel needed
an AMD second source. Dell is operating from an era when IC's were
already commodity and their manufacturing process had become fairly well
understood.

The
new AMD notebook chips could be the key... if they're any good. I am
absolutely convinced that Intel's enthusiasm for "platformization" based on
the "Centrino success" is a total misread. People don't buy notebooks
because of Centrino.

Intel is enthusiastic about the platform because it gets to bundle sales
of chipsets with processors together.

Yousuf Khan

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:02:19 -0500, George Macdonald
wrote:

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:59:28 -0500, Robert Myers
wrote:

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 03:36:41 -0500, George Macdonald
wrote:

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 06:55:49 -0500, Robert Myers
wrote:


snip


It's really tangential from the point of the post, but it will be
fascinating to see whether intel (with it's symbiotic "competitor"
AMD) keeps its place of dominance against globalization and against
all recent history to the contrary. Looking to that recent history,
though, the place to look for new competition is not US companies.
Wonder where the "red flag" processor will be ten years from now.
Wonder where x86 will be ten years from now?

What? You think some Chinese genius is going to stamp his CPU in the
memory of Chairman Mao?:-) I thought we'd been over that already a while
back.

Did we completely dispense with China? I don't remember the thread
and I can't find it.

To do with cultural, social, economic err, immaturity?... an "adolescent"
society is what I seem to recall you used - no?

That sounds right. American society was adolescent, too, when it grew
and innovated its way into being an industrial and technological
giant. Didn't have the huge population and poverty of China, though.

At any rate I don't see
them as a big threat - they've been put in their place on their Wi-Fi rogue
"standard"... fortunately for them in the long run. Basically they've
shown themsleves to be pretty adept at buggering up a good thing with weird
socio-political moves.

It is really hard to imagine how China manages to maintain stability,
but I wouldn't rule out nationalism and militarism as forces that
could drive a successful technology push.

I don't want to rouse sleeping dogs here, but I
just wish to hell they'd get on with oil exploration & production, instead
of keeping in in the bank.... err, ground.

Another thing the energy modelers left off in the early going: the
cost of capital to exploit resources that are available. ;-)

snip


I mean, _who_ is going to outfit the world with PC's? Not Dell,
surely. The margins are going to be miserable, and Intel-style
marketing probably won't do it.

The only really pressing requirement for performance will be
throughput, something that Via has been able to deliever on. In this
brave new world, no one will care how fast a processor compiles the
linux kernel. We may miss most of this action, because it will be
taking place in other markets, but it's hard to believe that the
effects won't eventually wash up on the shores of North America and
Western Europe.

I'm sure VIA has found a niche in the developing economies but as for
China, I'd think their processors would lack the oomph required to do
Chinese caharacter sets. I've seen this in action and even a "text"
document drags the CPU down horribly... not sure how it all works out.

Taiwan and Japan seem to cope somehow. Back to the cost of capital
issue, building a microprocessor industry doesn't seem like a wise
investment for China, except to satisfy their miliary ambitions, which
they do have.

RM

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:33:26 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

Robert Myers wrote:
It's really tangential from the point of the post, but it will be
fascinating to see whether intel (with it's symbiotic "competitor"
AMD) keeps its place of dominance against globalization and against
all recent history to the contrary. Looking to that recent history,
though, the place to look for new competition is not US companies.
Wonder where the "red flag" processor will be ten years from now.
Wonder where x86 will be ten years from now?

Yeah, exactly what my point was, the auto industry got reinvigorated
with globalization, and I expect that the next CPU powerhouse will be
from outside the US as well. My bets are on China producing the next
one. However the Europeans have some established chip companies that may
be able to grow depending on European government support. The Chinese
one will also require government support.

But the challenges there are mind-bending.

Oh another example from another industry. Boeing was headed for a global
passenger plane monopoly (Lockheed, MD, all got consolidated out), until
Airbus got some long-term European government support and took it on.


There is no free market in aerospace. The Europeans claim that the US
susidizes its aerospace industry with military procurement (true) and
the US aerospace industry claims that Airbus Industrie is subsidized
in ways that are not available to, say, Boeing (also true). On top of
that, there is a documented history of industrial spying, bribes, and
influence peddling that make the alleged Intel pecadilloes seem
insignificant by comparison. And the US government picks winners and
losers. The semiconductor business is remarkable for having been
_relatively_ free of all that nonsense, certainly as compared to
aerospace.

RM

Robert Myers wrote:
Yeah, exactly what my point was, the auto industry got reinvigorated
with globalization, and I expect that the next CPU powerhouse will be

from outside the US as well. My bets are on China producing the next

one. However the Europeans have some established chip companies that may
be able to grow depending on European government support. The Chinese
one will also require government support.


But the challenges there are mind-bending.

A lot of the brain-power has already been exported out to the US and
other countries. They can just as easily re-import them, with some
incentives. For example, Stephen Chen who was Seymour Cray's protege and
then eventually his rival, is now back in China working on supercomputer
designs for them.

Oh another example from another industry. Boeing was headed for a global
passenger plane monopoly (Lockheed, MD, all got consolidated out), until
Airbus got some long-term European government support and took it on.



There is no free market in aerospace. The Europeans claim that the US
susidizes its aerospace industry with military procurement (true) and
the US aerospace industry claims that Airbus Industrie is subsidized
in ways that are not available to, say, Boeing (also true). On top of
that, there is a documented history of industrial spying, bribes, and
influence peddling that make the alleged Intel pecadilloes seem
insignificant by comparison. And the US government picks winners and
losers. The semiconductor business is remarkable for having been
_relatively_ free of all that nonsense, certainly as compared to
aerospace.

Yes, so far, the US government hasn't overtly preferential in the CPU
business, it tries from time to time to give contracts to AMD-based
hardware too (e.g. supercomputing). But of course the US gov is in the
same boat as every other business that needs to buy PCs, in that it's
dependent on purchasing whatever models of computers that manufacturers
offer, which is usually only Intel-based.

Yousuf Khan