AMD has filed a 48 page complaint [PDF] in federal district court (Delaware) accusing Intel of all manner of anti-competitive behaviour. Among the charges are that Intel pays huge sums of money to companies to limit their purchases of AMD processors and that it withholds rebates and marketing subsidies from customers who break the rules.

As anyone that reads the articles here regularly may have noticed, I’ve never had a high opinion of Intel, they always appear to be lead around by the nose by their marketing department and they took a step sideways (at best) when they swapped from PIII to P4 mostly because they figured being able to clock ever higher MHZ would help marketing. Clock cycle to clock cycle the old PIII is still a close competitor of the P4 despite being out of development for years. The P4 was just an exercise in marketing as AMD proved by outperforming it in power usage, heat generation and general performance and doing so at significantly lower clock speeds. And most of us fell for the Intel “MHZ is everything” spiel hook line and sinker.
Innovation and pricing should be the two factors determining market share, and if that was the case, AMD would have a handy lead on Intel. As we all know, this isn’t the case and even though Intel have been playing catch up in the technical stakes for some time now, they have lost hardly any of their market share. We may be about to find out why in a public and probably messy court battle.

AMD have created a page specifically for the purpose of detailing the relevant information and link to the relevant documents and you can find it here.

This article was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 9:05 am