AMD now has 'more than allegations' against Intel

The Register (UK) ^ | Monday 5th May 2008 21:14 GMT | Austin Modine

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

As Intel and AMD near the end of the discovery process in their US antitrust battle, the two companies have begun fighting over whose testimony will make it to the big dance. In a legal filing, AMD has pointed to the employees at some of the technology world's biggest names - HP, Dell, IBM and others - who it thinks will help make its case. Intel has responded in kind, and it's now up to a judge to decide on the strength of the vendors' arguments.

Following a dispute over the number of depositions allowed in the case, Special Master Vincent Poppiti appointed to hear evidence from both companies ordered up a pair of "preliminary pre-trial briefs." Well, it's those very briefs which have now been turned over to the press.

AMD's beefy filing claims to offer new evidence to support the original accusations filed back in 2005, at the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

"The current brief reflects that the allegations are more than allegations," said AMD spokesman, Michael Silverman. "The evidence exists."

Unfortunately, most of this purported evidence has been redacted from the public version of the brief. Both companies had previously signed a confidentiality order to guard trade secrets, making for long, tantalizing passages buried behind this kind of nonsense and more of it in AMD's latest 108-page summary.

What can be gleaned from the filings are the companies that AMD claims have been influenced by Intel's anti-competitive behavior.

AMD fingers a laundry-list of major OEMs: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Gateway, Acer, Sony, NEC, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Hitachi as holding anti-competitive, exclusive arrangements with Intel. It also calls for testimony from smaller builders such as Supermicro and Rackable. All the sections covering these vendors are heavily censored, however, making it hard to grasp anything beyond that AMD claims to have acquired specific evidence of misconduct.

********************************snip************************

On Hewlett-Packard: Auspiciously following a full page of censored text, "The result: HP took only 160,000 of the one million free processors that AMD had offered it. No rational computer manufacturer would leave 840,000 free, state-of-the-art microprocessors on the table unless it had been foreclosed from using them by exclusionary conduct. And this is precisely what happened."

While the censored text above the statement blocks what the deal was really about — a vendor turning down 840,000 free chips warrants some raised eyebrows. Certainly unusual behavior.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This is an EXCERPT

*************************

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

H/T to Groklaw's sidebar for this:

http://www.groklaw.net/

[Dr._Joseph_Warren]

HP took only 160,000 of the one million free processors that AMD had offered it. No rational computer manufacturer would leave 840,000 free, state-of-the-art microprocessors on the table unless it had been foreclosed from using them by exclusionary conduct. And this is precisely what happened."

While the censored text above the statement blocks what the deal was really about — a vendor turning down 840,000 free chips warrants some raised eyebrows. Certainly unusual behavior.

Then again, I'm not sure of what "rational" chip manufacturer would give away 1,000,000 chips for free without raising some eyebrows as well.

[ShadowAce]

[RayChuang88]

The problem for AMD right now is once Intel unveiled its Conroe-core CPU's (which are based on the excellent CPU core used on the Pentium III Mobile CPU), it was pretty much all over for AMD--the Conroe-core CPU's ran faster and much cooler than its AMD equivalent.