The Intel mobo recall was for a defective 820 chipset but the PIII 600's were recalled for overheating after Intel over-volted them to try and catch up to AMD who was the first to 1 Gig.

Funny how reality doen't support some peoples selective memory or bias views.

...the Greek EU ombudsman is obviously on the take.

"senior Dell executive" does not mean anything to me. In my experience the only thing that senior executives have in common is that they can read, write and count to at least 10. If he works in marketing, counting is optional.

I am not suggesting that all executives are clueless, but some of them are. If Intel really did have an advantage over AMD they would flag that during the trial. The case is about Intel providing kickbacks to major companies for not buying competitors product. This is anticompetitive. If Intel was better then AMD why did Intel have to behave in the way that it did to sell their product?

While AMD has come a long way, in the old days their products had a high failure and compatibility rate, I know since I had some K7's and they were a pain to work with at times. However the main point of the performance issue was that AMD could not insure enough supply due to lack of capacity. There are issues on both sides of the fence. The main issue was that AMD did not have the capacity nor quality to provide OEM's confidence in their product where as Intel had both, Intel wasted their money with any payoffs they may or may not have made, AMD would still dig themselves into the ground. The massive Intel recall was due to a bug with RDRAM (on the 820 northbridge), not a CPU issue.

That is why Intel contract AMD to build their CPU's in the days that they could not meet the market demand. Intel must have been stupid to use such a low quality company as AMD to outsource this work. Actually I was very disappointed when I bought my Intel 486SX 33MHz since I thought it would have blown away my AMD 386DX 40MHz because I thought that all 486's came with co-processors but I was wrong and not only that my first 33MHz True Intel 486 came with the heatsink dangling (at the time I didn't know enough to build my own system) and not on the CPU.

Do you know then end result of that assembling error. It was that a little fire started in my system and the whole thing needed to be replaced. This was on a real Intel CPU. BTW at the time 486's were the first to have heatsinks put on the CPU but at that time they were passive sinks and they didn't use thermal past either. My AMD 386DX 40Mhz with the additional co-processor didn't even need a heatsink and was faster then the Intel 486.

I know this was ages ago you are right and this is not today's issue at all but the point is that everyone goes through these phases. Currently Intel's CPU's do gobble more Watts then AMD's and that means they get hotter. Don't even try to argue this since the problem I always have to explain is that up until the i5/i7 CPU from intel they didn't have the northbridge integrated into the CPU package. So adding the extra wattage that the extra interfacing chips use Intel is always using more watts over AMD. Hey look the i7 actually uses more then AMD even at a lower Hz then AMD.

BTW there is a reason why heatsinks are rated by how many Watts they can dissipate and here is the simple reason why: The amount of Watts used is relative to the temperature produced. Yes of course there are some advancements in micro-channel etching on CPU's to allow better cooling but to my knowledge these are not what is currently mass produced and bought by consumers like you and me. Until we have super conductors (when will graphene be used in CPU's dang it) there will always be heat produced by any and all electronic systems.

Mike-

What a laugh. AMD did have some CPus that ran hot but so did Intel and neither had anything to do with sale volume or violation of anti-trist laws.

The PIII 600's were just overclocked CPUs that would fry eggs and had to be recalled. You do remember the numerous Intel CPU and mobos that were recalled, right? Several MILLION units if memory serves me correctly.

Get Real -

AMD has NOT 'always sold quality CPUs that were competitive or better than Intel.'

An AMD cpu was able to fry an egg on it's heat sink, long before Intel's netburst tech came out.

Tomas-

Paleeease stop talking thru your arse. I and many others have followed the CPU wars for the past 30 years. AMD has always sold quality CPUs that were competitive or better than Intel. VIA, SIS, and other companies who supplied northbridge/southbridge mobo chips had competitive products though not necessarily always as efficient as Intel's.

What the EU is fining Intel for is ILLEGAL BUSINESS PRACTICES, as in documented violation of anti-trust laws. Dell's claims that they didn't sell AMD products because they were not as good has been proven false by Dell's own internal documents. If you follow the bribe money, which investigators have, there is no doubt about Dell's unscupulous behavior and Intel's crimes for which they have been convicted.

Unfortunately AMD's founder Jerry Sanders decided to out-source chipset production back in the days when he bought Nextgen and the K6 CPU.
That meant AMD's fortune was effectively put in the hands of companies like VIA and SIS. They simply didn't deliver quality products unfortunately. If a company sold too many AMD/VIA products they would often go under because of too many user complaints.
The really sad story is why so many journalists where fooled into recommending these products. The problems where obvious and grim.
Intels only major problem was too high a price. However that also makes it questionable that the should be able to undercut AMD only by using rebates. It simply doesn't make sense. The companies that sold most AMD and VIA products where Compaq and IBM. They didn't survive. Think about it. Those who sold Intel products like Dell and HP did. That's what happened.

How many times does it have to be proved that Dull has been in bed with Intel? I mean come one the collusion has been documented countless times. AMD has so much evidence to prove Intel has violated anti-trust laws worldwide that only a drunken crackhead could argue against the merits of a EUR 500 BILLION fine for Intel.

Most of this case went back to the days when AMD were more unreliable than Intel. The failure rate of AMD chips in the period 1999-2002 was higher than Intel, by some margin. These are measurable figures from the PC OEM I worked for.

On this basis you might consider that Dell did not only consider GHz as a measurement of 'performance'

That said this is not the case now and more certainly it is true that Dell and many others quite clearly took Intel's Dollar for a long time!

is the senior dell executive on the intel payroll too? everyone knows that hz for hz AMD performs better than intel and £ for £, intel is overpriced tat.
i think the credibility of this man needs to be confirmed before his evidence is admissable in a court of law.

an honest man does rarely a senior executive make