When the going gets tough, Intel gets dirty

ALONG WITH A REVIEW [cough!] of Susan Boyle's latest performance on Britain's got Talent, CNet this morning carries an interview with Tom McCoy, AMD's senior vice president of legal affairs, who said that whenever AMD manages to get its act togther to pose a threat to Intel, Intel gets nasty.

"They did it when we came to market in 1999 with the Athlon," McCoy claimed. "And they did it big time when we came to market in 2003 with the Opteron processor for the server and the Athlon 64 processor," he said.

He said AMD's use of an integrated memory controller and its focus on energy efficiency caught Intel on the hop. "That's when they really got out of control," McCoy said.

But the lawyer said AMD doesn't care about the $1.45 billion fine the European Commission slapped on Intel. "We don't care about the fine. That's simply consumer harm," he said.

"What's important to us is the injunction. The decision carries with it an immediate injunction. To stop doing things that are illegally foreclosing AMD technology from getting to the market," he said.

An Intel spokesman replied: "If Intel technology did not perform well and our product road map was not strong, customers would go elsewhere."

He failed to mention that if there was no AMD, there would be nowhere else for customers to go.