The Shrine

Austin (TX) - In one of the most stunning developments in the hardware industry in past years, AMD has decided to take Intel to court: AMD claims that Intel has violated antitrust laws by unfairly maintaining its monopoly in the microprocessor industry.

Following a Japanese antitrust ruling against Intel in March of this year, AMD is turning up the heat on Intel by filing an antitrust suit against Intel and its Japanese subsidiary Intel Kabushiki Kaisha. Similar to the antitrust claims that were brought against Microsoft in the late 1990s by the US government, AMD accuses Intel to have used unfair competitive methods to maintain its monopoly and keep AMD from increasing its market share.

The suit mentions seven potential antitrust violations, ranging from forcing customers into exclusive deals, conditioned rebates, the creation of a discriminatory rebate system, threat of retaliation, enforced quotas, pressure to boycott AMD products, and use of industrial standards against AMD.

As a result, the company claims, AMD's market share AMD's was "capped" and prevented the manufacturer "from expanding to reach the minimum efficient levels of scale necessary to compete with Intel as a predominant supplier to major customers."

Intel declined to comment on the accusations.

c. Intel’s Leveraging of Its Other Product Lines to Unfairly Disadvantage
AMD in the Marketplace
122. Intel has also designed and marketed microprocessor-related products with the
goal of compromising performance for those who opt for AMD solutions, even if it requires
sacrificing its own product quality and integrity.
123. An example is Intel’s compilers. Generally, independent software vendors
(“ISVs”) write software programs in high-level languages, such as C, C++, or Fortran. Before
these programs can be understood by a computer system, they must be translated into object
code – a machine-readable language – by a software program called a compiler. Different
companies write compilers for different operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.) and for
different programming languages (C, C++, Fortran, etc.). Intel offers compilers for use with a
variety of different operating systems and programming languages.
124. Intel’s compilers are designed to perform specialized types of optimizations that
are particularly advantageous for ISVs developing software programs that rely heavily upon
floating point or vectorized mathematical calculations. Such programs include, for example,
mathematical modeling, multimedia, and video game applications.
125. Intel has designed its compiler purposely to degrade performance when a program
is run on an AMD platform. To achieve this, Intel designed the compiler to compile code
along several alternate code paths. Some paths are executed when the program runs on an Intel
platform and others are executed when the program is operated on a computer with an AMD
microprocessor. (The choice of code path is determined when the program is started, using a
feature known as “CPUID” which identifies the computer’s microprocessor.) By design, the
code paths were not created equally. If the program detects a “Genuine Intel” microprocessor,
it executes a fully optimized code path and operates with the maximum efficiency. However,
if the program detects an “Authentic AMD” microprocessor, it executes a different code path
that will degrade the program’s performance or cause it to crash.
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126. ISVs are forced to choose between Intel’s compilers, which degrade the
performance of their software when operated with AMD microprocessors, or third-party
compilers, which do not contain Intel’s particular optimizations. Sadly for AMD and its
customers, for legitimate reasons Intel’s compilers appeal to certain groups of ISVs, especially
those developing software programs that rely heavily on floating point and vectorized math
calculations. Unbeknownst to them, performance of their programs is degraded when run on
an AMD microprocessor not because of design deficiencies on the part of AMD, but
deviousness on the part of Intel.