Intel fined $1.5 billion by EU competition authority

Robert Myers wrote:
On May 16, 4:23 pm, YKhan wrote:
How is the duopoly threatened? The Intel monopoly certainly is, but
the emergence of a true duopoly can only strengthen.

The traditional x86 market is being squeezed from both the low end and
the high: low-power chips that come from neither AMD nor Intel and
that may not even be x86 and high performance stream processors to
offload most compute-intensive tasks on the high end.

That's completely wrong, of course. On the high end, it is x86 that is
squeezing out the traditional RISC processors. Unless your world
definition of "squeeze" is much more loose, and includes such examples
as a rubber ball /squeezing/ the surface of a road, when it hits it: you
can argue that the road surface might flex microscopically, but the
rubber ball will show much more flexure. Besides, "high-end" isn't even
limited to just HPC work, it's the entire datacentre thing that needs to
be looked at. The datacentre is increasingly going x86.

Calling specialized HPC stream processors a high-end threat, is to even
insult the very definition of a high-end processor. You can't even run
applications on a stream processor without assist from a CPU, and
usually that CPU is an x86 rather than a RISC. And actually, it's the
threat from a CPU and a stream processor combo that's also creating a
bigger threat to high-end RISC: a stream processor is more specialized
than a RISC, while an x86 is more generalized than a RISC, together it's
a threat.

For one thing, stream processors (GPGPU) are likely to take the focus
off x86 for compute-intensive applications. AMD/ATI is an interesting
player in this area and, unlike Intel, isn't trying to extend the x86
franchise in this direction.
The only people who can use the calculation abilities of a GPU are the
usual suspects, HPC/Supercomputing. Everybody else will use the
simpler units.

Hardly. "Computing" becomes more and more media-intensive all the
time, and the demand for compute bandwidth just keeps climbing right
along with it. Intel had the right idea with the P4; it's just that
trying to marry stream processing to an old-fashioned general purpose
CPU wasn't the right way to confront the media intensive future.
Instead, the action (and the margin along with it) have switched to
the GPU.

Again, stream processors like GPUs don't even work without the CPU.

Whatever. There is no sign that it makes any difference to IBM, one
way or another.

Yeah, right. Just like there was no sign that IBM had an interest in
Opteron and the failure of Itanium as a significant player in the
server market.

I have no idea whether you're insulting Opteron or Itanium or IBM.
Sometimes you're just a big sarcasm shotgun with no fixed target.

Finally,concerns about energy consumption are a huge game-changer,
putting Via chips in Dell servers and making the search for highest
performance per watt outside the x86 space look more attractive than
ever.
All boats will be lifted, once Intel was taken down.

That's just baloney. Intel's argument, which will be rejected by the
EU, is that the industry, as dominated by Intel, has done an almost
unbelievably good job of delivering low-cost performance. The EU
argument is ideological, not grounded in any market-based reality.

That's right, after nine years of investigation (complaint filed
originally in 2000), plenty of opportunity for Intel to respond but
failing to do so, in the end the EU was just an emotional wreck and
chose based on "feelings". The same goes for Japan and South Korea
before it, who also found Intel guilty. Three for three, all these
countries have it in for Intel.

Anyways, VIA's entry into the Dell low-end server portfolio is an
example of all boats now being lifted as a result of AMD's takedown of
Intel. It's probably not a coincidence that Dell felt confident enough
to introduce a VIA-based server just a couple of days after Intel lost.

I assume that no one is talking because business sucks. From a
technical point of view, these are exciting times.
They have been exciting technological times for a decade now.

Hardly. The only thing interesting about the last decade is that it
could be broken down to something like sports teams. In the end,
everybody was trying to aim at the same abstractly-defined chip, which
led to a computing monoculture. Now we are seeing new design
constraints and architectures that are materially different.

You're still invoking the stock market as an indicator of anything, even
now?!? It's plain to see that the stock market was _at best_ a Ponzi
scheme, and at worst a rigged casino. The only thing it was an indicator
of was its own greed. If the best you can call it is a Ponzi scheme, if
that's the moral high-ground, then that's like comparing the seven
levels of Hell: you don't want to enter any of the levels.

If you listened to the stock market, then it's betting was that AMD was
already dead two years ago. In fact, one hack, Rick Hodgin, even wrote
an article wondering aloud why his prediction that AMD would be gone
didn't come true:

"I published an article in April, 2007 entitled AMD crash foretold in 2007, wherein after only two consecutive quarters of loss totaling nearly $1.2 billion, and after the amazingly strong Core architecture released by Intel, I wrote “Okay, it’s time to get serious: AMD is in some real trouble. So much so that it could be out of cash in two quarters. At least that’s what one analyst is saying and what EE Times is reporting today” — referring to an April 20, 2007 EE Times article whereby analysts say “AMD is nearly out of cash”.

We were all wrong then, and we’re continuing to be wrong … though I’m not sure many people know how that is. A company with avenue revenues of $1.5 billion per quarter, with an average quarterly loss of $740 million … how long can a company like that continue on without strong cash reserves or constant infusions from somewhere?"
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/a...eting-2009051/

Intel has done two things consummately well: manufacture high-end x86
chips and market them ruthlessly. Both advantages are threatened.
This ruling only affects their marketing capabilities, manufacturing
isn't affected at all.

The money to offload manufacturing never would have materialized
without the likelihood of this kind of government intervention.


What are you talking about?

Yousuf Khan

On May 17, 7:48*pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:
Robert Myers wrote:
On May 16, 4:23 pm, YKhan wrote:
How is the duopoly threatened? The Intel monopoly certainly is, but
the emergence of a true duopoly can only strengthen.

The traditional x86 market is being squeezed from both the low end and
the high: low-power chips that come from neither AMD nor Intel and
that may not even be x86 and high performance stream processors to
offload most compute-intensive tasks on the high end.

That's completely wrong, of course. On the high end, it is x86 that is
squeezing out the traditional RISC processors. Unless your world
definition of "squeeze" is much more loose, and includes such examples
as a rubber ball /squeezing/ the surface of a road, when it hits it: you
can argue that the road surface might flex microscopically, but the
rubber ball will show much more flexure.

Stick to bidding clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, and no trump,
because sarcasm isn't your suit. It's very hard to be convincingly
sarcastic when you've just missed the point.

Besides, "high-end" isn't even
limited to just HPC work, it's the entire datacentre thing that needs to
be looked at. The datacentre is increasingly going x86.

I'm thinking of high and and low end in terms of processor complexity
and capability. It wasn't too long ago that someone in one of these
forums (and perhaps you) was stating with sarcastic certainty that Via
chips would never appear in servers. It's been known for a long time
that the be-everything-to-everybody chip that "high-end" x86 has
become is far from ideal for servers, both in terms of power
consumption and real estate. "Low-end" x86 will increasingly find
applications where "high-end" chips once ruled, and, once you are
trying to design for minimum power consumption and server footprint,
it isn't clear that x86 will be the long-run winner at all.

For those applications where the CPU is performing more compute-
intensive tasks, it's far from obvious how much of the work will wind
up in processors that bear little resemblance to, say, core i7. It's
like the early 90's again with respect to parallelism, except that,
then, the winner (often even for applications like databases) was
clusters of commodity processors--at a time when commodity processors
were much less complex than they are now.. Is it better to have a
computer full of atom or via or arm, or is it better to a have a
computer where most of the work is done by processors that look more
like GPU's? At this point, I don't think anyone knows. How much will
be left for the von Neumann bottleneck of yesteryear? Not much.

Similarly, it isn't clear that x86 will be the long-term winner in a
mobile space that looks more and more like what used to be called the
embedded market.

Calling specialized HPC stream processors a high-end threat, is to even
insult the very definition of a high-end processor. You can't even run
applications on a stream processor without assist from a CPU, and
usually that CPU is an x86 rather than a RISC.

You can run full-up Linux or BSD on stream processors. Even were it
convenient to have a more conventional CPU around to to things like
cope with I/O and interrupts, that CPU doesn't have to be particularly
sophisticated or capable.

And actually, it's the
threat from a CPU and a stream processor combo that's also creating a
bigger threat to high-end RISC: a stream processor is more specialized
than a RISC, while an x86 is more generalized than a RISC, together it's
a threat.

But the "host processor," whatever it is, doesn't have to be much,
because the muscle will be in the stream processor.

snip

Whatever. There is no sign that it makes any difference to IBM, one
way or another.

Yeah, right. *Just like there was no sign that IBM had an interest in
Opteron and the failure of Itanium as a significant player in the
server market.

I have no idea whether you're insulting Opteron or Itanium or IBM.
Sometimes you're just a big sarcasm shotgun with no fixed target.

Intel and Microsoft are competitors and allies-of-opportunity for
IBM. AMD is just an ally.


That's right, after nine years of investigation (complaint filed
originally in 2000), plenty of opportunity for Intel to respond but
failing to do so, in the end the EU was just an emotional wreck and
chose based on "feelings". The same goes for Japan and South Korea
before it, who also found Intel guilty. Three for three, all these
countries have it in for Intel.

The question is, guilty of what. Did Intel make life hard for AMD?
Without a doubt. Did it do so with malice aforethought? Hard to
believe the answer is no.

But did they harm consumers? The EU's position (and yours and the
position of many others here) is that consumers are harmed if there is
market domination by one company. There's no proof of that. It's
conjecture or mostly an article of religious belief on your part.

Anyways, VIA's entry into the Dell low-end server portfolio is an
example of all boats now being lifted as a result of AMD's takedown of
Intel. It's probably not a coincidence that Dell felt confident enough
to introduce a VIA-based server just a couple of days after Intel lost.

The VIA deal has been in the works for a long time. It's true that
Dell is probably less afraid of Intel than it once was. In any case,
what you are arguing now vitiates your initial claim that nothing of
material importance has happened.

snip

You're still invoking the stock market as an indicator of anything, even
now?!? It's plain to see that the stock market was _at best_ a Ponzi
scheme, and at worst a rigged casino. The only thing it was an indicator
of was its own greed. If the best you can call it is a Ponzi scheme, if
that's the moral high-ground, then that's like comparing the seven
levels of Hell: you don't want to enter any of the levels.

If you'd said that capitalism was a Ponzi scheme, I'd have agreed with
you. Markets actually work pretty well, except when they don't. When
don't markets work well? They don't work well when they are gamed or
rigged, which is part of what has gone so badly wrong. It was debt
and not equity markets, though, that were rigged through manipulation
of bond ratings. Markets also don't work when everyone starts doing
the same thing, which is what happened with valuation models being
used by Wall Street. Again, it was debt and not equity markets that
were affected.

The odd thing about Ponzi schemes is that, locally, they work just
fine. Investors look at past performance and bet on what they take to
be winners. The problem with all Ponzi schemes (including capitalism)
is the failure to recognize global constraints: there isn't an endless
supply of new investors, the economy cannot grow at an exponential
rate forever, housing prices cannot go up forever at a rate that
exceeds the general rate of inflation, and there is not an endless
supply of cheap labor and natural resources to exploit.


If you listened to the stock market, then it's betting was that AMD was
already dead two years ago. In fact, one hack, Rick Hodgin, even wrote
an article wondering aloud why his prediction that AMD would be gone
didn't come true:

Which is why I pointed out the recent performance of AMD. Clearly,
something is up.


The money to offload manufacturing never would have materialized
without the likelihood of this kind of government intervention.

What are you talking about?

If you go to an investor and say, "If you give me more money, I can
turn my money-losing business," the investor will say, "How?"

The "How" in this case is in part government intervention in markets.

Robert.

Robert Myers wrote:
On May 17, 7:48 pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:
Robert Myers wrote:
On May 16, 4:23 pm, YKhan wrote:
How is the duopoly threatened? The Intel monopoly certainly is, but
the emergence of a true duopoly can only strengthen.
The traditional x86 market is being squeezed from both the low end and
the high: low-power chips that come from neither AMD nor Intel and
that may not even be x86 and high performance stream processors to
offload most compute-intensive tasks on the high end.
That's completely wrong, of course. On the high end, it is x86 that is
squeezing out the traditional RISC processors. Unless your world
definition of "squeeze" is much more loose, and includes such examples
as a rubber ball /squeezing/ the surface of a road, when it hits it: you
can argue that the road surface might flex microscopically, but the
rubber ball will show much more flexure.

Stick to bidding clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, and no trump,
because sarcasm isn't your suit. It's very hard to be convincingly
sarcastic when you've just missed the point.

And you missed your own point about how x86 is being threatened from the
high-end. Specialty stream processors isn't it, and in fact are
dependent on x86 working for them.

Besides, "high-end" isn't even
limited to just HPC work, it's the entire datacentre thing that needs to
be looked at. The datacentre is increasingly going x86.

I'm thinking of high and and low end in terms of processor complexity
and capability. It wasn't too long ago that someone in one of these
forums (and perhaps you) was stating with sarcastic certainty that Via
chips would never appear in servers. It's been known for a long time
that the be-everything-to-everybody chip that "high-end" x86 has
become is far from ideal for servers, both in terms of power
consumption and real estate. "Low-end" x86 will increasingly find
applications where "high-end" chips once ruled, and, once you are
trying to design for minimum power consumption and server footprint,
it isn't clear that x86 will be the long-run winner at all.

Depends on which "server" tasks you're talking about. It's been true
since the 90's that a lot of tasks that servers used to do are now being
transfered over to appliances. You can argue that a NAS box is what
traditionally used to be called a file server in the olden days. NAS
boxes can have pretty much anything for a processor in them. Same goes
for what used to be called a print server, firewall, etc. So low-end
server may not be x86 anymore, but then it's not for RISC either.

For those applications where the CPU is performing more compute-
intensive tasks, it's far from obvious how much of the work will wind
up in processors that bear little resemblance to, say, core i7. It's
like the early 90's again with respect to parallelism, except that,
then, the winner (often even for applications like databases) was
clusters of commodity processors--at a time when commodity processors
were much less complex than they are now.. Is it better to have a
computer full of atom or via or arm, or is it better to a have a
computer where most of the work is done by processors that look more
like GPU's? At this point, I don't think anyone knows. How much will
be left for the von Neumann bottleneck of yesteryear? Not much.

I doubt servers with Atom, or VIA, or ARM are being used for computing
much. They might serve a purpose in the aforementioned server appliance
businesses. Atom and VIA are both low-end x86, of course.

Similarly, it isn't clear that x86 will be the long-term winner in a
mobile space that looks more and more like what used to be called the
embedded market.

The embedded market was never big-time x86 anyways. This is where ARM
and MIPS used to play, for decades. ARM made its name in embedded.

Calling specialized HPC stream processors a high-end threat, is to even
insult the very definition of a high-end processor. You can't even run
applications on a stream processor without assist from a CPU, and
usually that CPU is an x86 rather than a RISC.

You can run full-up Linux or BSD on stream processors. Even were it
convenient to have a more conventional CPU around to to things like
cope with I/O and interrupts, that CPU doesn't have to be particularly
sophisticated or capable.

Look more carefully, those Linux and BSD are usually running on x86
"service processors". They only feed the stream processors with data,
they don't run on them.

And actually, it's the
threat from a CPU and a stream processor combo that's also creating a
bigger threat to high-end RISC: a stream processor is more specialized
than a RISC, while an x86 is more generalized than a RISC, together it's
a threat.

But the "host processor," whatever it is, doesn't have to be much,
because the muscle will be in the stream processor.

The stream processor is hardly the muscle, more like a robot arm grafted
on. The host or service processor is what's communicating with the rest
of the system, handling i/o, and keeping the stream processor fed. Let's
see how fast a stream processor would go if it had to handle its own
interrupts.

Whatever. There is no sign that it makes any difference to IBM, one
way or another.
Yeah, right. Just like there was no sign that IBM had an interest in
Opteron and the failure of Itanium as a significant player in the
server market.
I have no idea whether you're insulting Opteron or Itanium or IBM.
Sometimes you're just a big sarcasm shotgun with no fixed target.

Intel and Microsoft are competitors and allies-of-opportunity for
IBM. AMD is just an ally.

So what's your point?

That's right, after nine years of investigation (complaint filed
originally in 2000), plenty of opportunity for Intel to respond but
failing to do so, in the end the EU was just an emotional wreck and
chose based on "feelings". The same goes for Japan and South Korea
before it, who also found Intel guilty. Three for three, all these
countries have it in for Intel.

The question is, guilty of what. Did Intel make life hard for AMD?
Without a doubt. Did it do so with malice aforethought? Hard to
believe the answer is no.

If it's hard for you to believe that the answer is no, then that means
you agree that Intel was intentionally malicious.

But did they harm consumers? The EU's position (and yours and the
position of many others here) is that consumers are harmed if there is
market domination by one company. There's no proof of that. It's
conjecture or mostly an article of religious belief on your part.

You *believe* that Intel with 80-90% marketshare is not dominant, yet we
just have a religious belief on _our_ part?!? I think it takes some
strong culty religion to come to your conclusion.

Your problem is that you like Intel. Just substitute all of the stuff
you said about Intel and insert Microsoft in there instead, and you'll
see why your position is so nutty.

Anyways, VIA's entry into the Dell low-end server portfolio is an
example of all boats now being lifted as a result of AMD's takedown of
Intel. It's probably not a coincidence that Dell felt confident enough
to introduce a VIA-based server just a couple of days after Intel lost.

The VIA deal has been in the works for a long time. It's true that
Dell is probably less afraid of Intel than it once was. In any case,
what you are arguing now vitiates your initial claim that nothing of
material importance has happened.

I'm sure the VIA deal has been in the works for years -- because Dell
was too afraid to commmit to VIA all of this time due to Intel. I'm sure
if this judgment hadn't come down, then at this point in time Dell
would've been announcing an Atom-based server rather than a VIA-based one.

You're still invoking the stock market as an indicator of anything, even
now?!? It's plain to see that the stock market was _at best_ a Ponzi
scheme, and at worst a rigged casino. The only thing it was an indicator
of was its own greed. If the best you can call it is a Ponzi scheme, if
that's the moral high-ground, then that's like comparing the seven
levels of Hell: you don't want to enter any of the levels.

If you'd said that capitalism was a Ponzi scheme, I'd have agreed with
you. Markets actually work pretty well, except when they don't. When
don't markets work well? They don't work well when they are gamed or
rigged, which is part of what has gone so badly wrong. It was debt
and not equity markets, though, that were rigged through manipulation
of bond ratings. Markets also don't work when everyone starts doing
the same thing, which is what happened with valuation models being
used by Wall Street. Again, it was debt and not equity markets that
were affected.

Hardly, it was debts that were just the latest scandal. You don't have
to go back too far back in history to Enron, Worldcom, dot-com bust,
etc. to see that this is just the latest in a series of disasters over
the last 8 years. Every market is involved, equities, debts, housing,
car, oil, etc.

If you listened to the stock market, then it's betting was that AMD was
already dead two years ago. In fact, one hack, Rick Hodgin, even wrote
an article wondering aloud why his prediction that AMD would be gone
didn't come true:

Which is why I pointed out the recent performance of AMD. Clearly,
something is up.

Nothing is up, it was just people who call themselves experts who are
now discredited.

Yousuf Khan

On May 20, 12:04*am, Yousuf Khan wrote:


Nothing is up, it was just people who call themselves experts who are
now discredited.


Whatever you say, Yousuf. You get the last word.

Robert.

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Intel hit by record EU fine

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...60&pagtype=all

-------------
The commission found that Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC had all gone
down that route, restricting AMD‘s access to the lucrative European
market.

In addition to paying the rebates, the Commission found that Intel had
actively sought to restrict the availability of AMD-powered products by
paying vendors to postpone or cancel the launch of PCs containing the
vendor's processors.
-------------

So which vendors were also fined because they participated in this
bribery scheme?

Intel Guy wrote:
The commission found that Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC had all gone
down that route, restricting AMD‘s access to the lucrative European
market.

In addition to paying the rebates, the Commission found that Intel had
actively sought to restrict the availability of AMD-powered products by
paying vendors to postpone or cancel the launch of PCs containing the
vendor's processors.
-------------

So which vendors were also fined because they participated in this
bribery scheme?

I don't think any of them are being fined, in exchange for testifying
against Intel.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:

--------------
The commission found that Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC had all
gone down that route, restricting AMD‘s access to the lucrative
European market.
-------------

So which vendors were also fined because they participated in
this bribery scheme?

I don't think any of them are being fined, in exchange for
testifying against Intel.

Too bad.

They're all just as guilty as Intel.

Who was the plaintiff in this case? Who originally brought it to the
attention of the EU competition Authority? A retailer? An individual
consumer or consumer group? Or was it AMD?

Was any similar anti-competition complaint filed against Intel or
investigated in the US?

Intel Guy wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
So which vendors were also fined because they participated in
this bribery scheme?

I don't think any of them are being fined, in exchange for
testifying against Intel.

Too bad.

They're all just as guilty as Intel.

Probably true, but it's probably also more important to get the
mastermind behind the idea put away first.

Who was the plaintiff in this case? Who originally brought it to the
attention of the EU competition Authority? A retailer? An individual
consumer or consumer group? Or was it AMD?

It was AMD who originally filed it back in 2000. There were a few starts
and stops along the way. In 2005, Japan found Intel guilty, and then the
EU case got its kickstart again. After 2005, the EU then raided the
offices of Intel, several OEMs, and a major IT retailer to obtain papers.

The EU's ruling only affects the period after 2000 (probably after 2003,
I think). So AMD had been complaining a long time, but couldn't prove
the case until after Japan. My feeling is the EU used Japan as a
template, because Japan also used surprise raids to get papers. They
used the Japanese techniques and they now knew what papers to look for.

Was any similar anti-competition complaint filed against Intel or
investigated in the US?

The New York attorney-general has opened up an investigation, and there
are rumors that the Obama FTC will be following suit (Bush FTC gave them
a free pass). And then there is a private civil lawsuit filed by AMD
against Intel, which is supposed to see the light of day in 2010 finally.

Yousuf Khan

Originally Posted by Yousuf Khan

It's actually €1.06 billion, or US$1.45 billion.

Techworld.com - Intel hit by record EU fine
"Here's one record that Intel won't want: the chip maker has just been
hit by the European Union's biggest fine for anti-competitive practices."
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...60&pagtype=all

its interesting!

Intel vs Amd

Originally Posted by YKhan

On May 14, 6:06*pm, Rthoreau wrote:
On May 14, 1:08*pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:

It's actually €1.06 billion, or US$1.45 billion.

Techworld.com - Intel hit by record EU fine
"Here's one record that Intel won't want: the chip maker has just been
hit by the European Union's biggest fine for anti-competitive practices.."http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsID=115760&pagtype=all

This will take another few years before any major money changes
hands. *The damage has already been done, I wonder if we will have a
choice in a year or so on processors for the desktop.

The money would be going to the European coffers anyways. AMD gets
nothing for this ruling. AMD will only get any money from the American
civil lawsuit it has filed against Intel since 2005. It's expected
that trial will finally begin in 2010.

In the meantime, AMD can only hope that Europe will curb Intel's
practices. Europe is taking this seriously, more seriously than the
Microsoft case, as it has decided to monitor Intel itself, rather than
appoint a trustee.

Yousuf Khan

I really like da post! Intel is taking da right of us! It will be warning for them!