A high proportion of IT columnists are surprisingly overweight - Martin Veitch
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FTC takes Intel to court
THE US FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION (FTC) filed a lawsuit in federal court against Intel today, seeking to stop the world's largest chipmaker from threatening, anti-competitive actions.
Although word processing applications will soon start to auto-complete the sentence, "Intel has been accused of antitrust violations", we'll have to keep typing it, and explain once again that someone has accused the firm of throwing its weight around and dominating the chip market.
Today the FTC said that Intel had unfairly harmed its rivals in semiconductor markets by either offering sweeteners or dishing out threats to its customers. In a statement released today, Richard A. Feinstein, director of the FTC's bureau of competition, said, "Intel has engaged in a deliberate campaign to hamstring competitive threats to its monopoly. It's been running roughshod over the principles of fair play and the laws protecting competition on the merits. The Commission's action today seeks to remedy the damage that Intel has done to competition, innovation, and, ultimately, the American consumer."
Of course this is not the first time that Intel has been up before the beak. It is currently appealing against a $1.45 billion antitrust fine levied by European regulators, and has already promised to pay a $1.25 billion settlement to AMD over similar charges. It might as well hand over the cash now.
The FTC's complaint accuses Intel of using threats and rewards to coerce major computer makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, to avoid or limit their purchases of competitors' chips. It adds in its statement that, "Intel also used this practice, known as exclusive or restrictive dealing, to prevent computer makers from marketing any machines with non-Intel computer chips."
Intel has also, allegedly, developed a tool that limits the performance of other chips. We don't know if it also had lasers for eyes, but the FTC said, "Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, in a way that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors' CPU chips. Intel told its customers and the public that software performed better on Intel CPUs than on competitors' CPUs, but the company deceived them by failing to disclose that these differences were due largely or entirely to Intel's compiler design."
Not unfairly perhaps, the FTC is making a number of demands, including that Intel cease using threats, bundling prices and hampering competition. Also under scrutiny are the ways that the firm might be unfairly manipulating chip prices and its recent activities in chipsets and GPUs, too.
Better warm up those lawyers, chaps. µ
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You, like so many, seem to forget, or not understand, that Apple is not a monopoly, or near monopoly with any of its devices.
But of course it's ok for Apple to put their software and browser in their OS and stiffle competition with their apps that will only run on their OS. Nah that is perfectly ok as long as their name isn't Microsoft. Oh they also can use the same tactics were their authorized dealers and thats ok to. The slective memory of everyone involved in this farce is a joke.
Oh ad the instruction differences between CISC and RISC alone could cause performance changes.
Anti-trust laws exist to prevent exactly what Intel and Microsoft do, which is blackmail the PC industry for profit. Skewing a compiler to produce false information, is just the beginning of a very long list of anti-trust violations for Intel.
Until recently the EU was the only authority with the integrity to fine Intel and Microsucks for the violations of law. Now the U.S. judicial system has no choice or they will be exposed for being puppets of two criminal corporations. If you want to see how much influence criminals have follow the PAC money from these two.
The last thing I want to do is defend intel. However, upon viewing the SPEC references posted previously, it was not apples to apples comparison. Intel was run on Windows Vista Ultimate and had a 7200 rpm Hard drive. AMD ran on SUSE linux and had a 10000 rpm disk drive.
The only true comparison would be run them both under Linux or Windows. But we suspect that Windows is AMD Hobbled.
For the people whining that it is ok to break the law as long as you make money, why don't you deal drugs?
Capitalism is like a fire, if it burns too hot we get burned. Reasonable constraints on business practices to foster competition benefits the public as consumers. Sell your whiddle elsewhere.
We created a Capitalist Society and Intel is merely a success of that. I don’t understand how and why anyone can whinge about antitrust if they are just making money? Ethics aside, I think everyone will agree that most companies will do whatever it takes to strengthen their balance sheets even if it’s at the expense of another rival. This happens in every walk of life and I feel these people are missing the bigger picture.
For goodness sake, it’s like listening to toddlers whine on a playground!
From Beta News:
"So among the remedies the FTC is seeking are price controls that would effectively bar Intel from making any kind of pricing discount deal with an OEM that it would not make with any other OEM of like standing in the market. It seeks to bar Intel from offering conditional rebates and discounts to OEMs, and from manufacturing any technology that intentionally impairs the performance of another from a competing manufacturer. It would prohibit Intel from producing false and misleading advertising, and to correct allegedly false statements it made in the past."
Because Intel /obviously/ simply didn't know that these things were monopolistic, and therefore not smiled upon by the legal system. Thank goodness the FTC is able to step in with these remedies that say "Don't do that!"
I'm guessing Intel is going to be donating quite heavily to the US Republican Party in 2012. It's much less annoying when the guys in charge like you.
Mr. Neal, Justin, and sugar daddy; the problems of rigged compilers has been out in the open for all sophisticated computer users to understand since this paper http://crd.lbl.gov/~oliker/papers/ipdps08_final.pdf was published in 2008 for IPDPS. With tuning (which eliminates Intel's manipulation of the compiler) an Opteron X2 could out perform an Intel quad core. Since Intel couldn't influence the compilers for the DARPA HPC Challenge Intel is 0 for 48 rankings beginning in 2006 while AMD is 22 out of 48. It is why the two Intel proposals for the Superpetaflop machines that arrive mid 2010 were the first two proposals eliminated. Blue Waters will be an IBM P7 and Cascade will use AMD Bulldozer cores. Either of these two machines will be about 10X faster than the fastest Intel machine, Red Sky. If you go to NITRD.gov you can find postings on all the problems. If you look at the confirmed test results at spec.org AMD Shanghai http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2008q2/cpu2006-20080428-04221.html beats the Intel Harpertown http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2008q2/cpu2006-20080428-04236.html by about 8%. two random samples using the same manufacturer to eliminate quibbling.
All the FTC did was take the blinders that they have worn for the last 15 years off and look around. Then they asked some intelligent questions of Horst Simon's people at NERSC.
@Justin:
"I'm guessing"
Instead of guessing, perhaps you should google for the EU Court of First Instance Intel provisional findings PDF file and read it. After reading it, you won't have to guess about Intel's practices any more - and for you, that'll be a good thing, because you guess wrong.
Perhaps the FTC will finally do to ICM what was done to IBM so long ago - they beat the living crap out of them and IBM changed their ways.
With ICM, things are different now, ICM never admit guilt, and have shedloads of illegally gained cash to throw at all those pesky little biting flies like AMD, the EU and the FTC....
......And keep on doing what ICM always does: engage in massive illegal acts to preserve their monopoly, destroy the competion and damage the consumer.
But don't take my word for it... read the EU Provisional findings doc for yourself. It'll change your mind forever.
*ICM - Intel Criminal Monopoly
Intel sabotaged their compiler suite to cripple compiled code that was run on non-Intel hardware. If the code found that it wasn't running on a genuine Intel CPU it stopped all checks for modern CPU instruction sets right there. All code paths optimized for MMX, SSE and what not were disabled. Hackers who tricked the code into thinking it was running on Intel hardware instead of AMD found that the Opterons that had been lagging Intel in benchmarks started whomping Intel. In fact, Intel "encouraged" benchmark makers to use Intel compilers. How many $billions did that bit of sabotage cost AMD and its stockholders?
Face it... this is the new tax collection system of the new century. When you run up massive debt and your tax base is eroding as unemployment continues to go up (officially its over 10%, unofficially it's believe to be in the 15-20% range when you consider people who have given up looking for work and are not on unemployment rolls). The problem with this approach is that while corporations are viewed as abstract entities (and more importantly don't vote and going after them won't piss people off), these tax collection systems just get passed on the consumer or the employee eventually. The fines are just going to be recouped via higher pricing on future products or via scaling back employees/costs.
After Intel, look for the FTC to go after the next large corporation with cash... Google, another run at Micrsoft, maybe even Apple.
As AMD has already settled with Intel and Intel has already handed over the 1.25Bil and agreed to arbitration if there are any believed future infractions... what exactly is the FTC trying to accomplish here, other than the cash grab?
At least with the EU suit, it was before the Intel/AMD settlement so you could argue it was somewhat intended as a deterrent and not just a pure cash grab, but what the FTC is just looking to ride the gravy train here and pay for Obama's next pork barrel project.
So let me get this straight:
FTC is suing Intel for the use of stereotypical business practices used since the creation of entrepreneurship "Using threats, bundling prices, and hampering competition."
So it seems to me that a company that the blame is being put on a company that by no law makes it required to use their hardware, in fact it is a 'de facto' standard for businesses world because of its competitive pricing.
I'm guessing the use of threats are basically "we may not offer this deal again" or other ridiculousness. It seems to me a company doesn't like to change its vendors as it may in the long run be more of a hassle to change things that aren't broken. I know there have been plenty of people who have used the technique of hassling their vendors by saying "we may change services unless we get a deal." Heck, people do that for their ISP all the time.
The hampering competition is just nonesense. 'We think Intel has some secret software hidden somewhere that we can't prove but its an allegation by us so its fact!' Yeah that won't hold up.
See? The EU call the shots where these big corporations are concerned.
Like everyone in the friggin world has known for the past 15 years of the violations of anti-trust laws that the WinTel cartel has used to reap hundreds of billions in profits. This ain't news unless the FTC fines Intel at least $500 BILLION for their crimes and turns the money over to AMD who has suffered at the hands of Intel's crime.