Intel cash pays down AMD debt Less than a week after accepting $1.25bn from Intel in exchange for dropping its legal actions against Chipzilla, AMD has announced how it plans to use that windfall. In a trio of Wednesday announcements, the world's second-largest microprocessor designer revealed a plan to slash its debt by as much as $1.4 billion, thus …
AT&T was broken up by local and long distance service as well as by service areas. Intel's dominance is in the manufacturing of Intel MicroProcessors. Were you thinking that Intel should only be allowed to sell microprocessors in certain geographical areas while AMD would have other protected geographic areas?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Intel deals in more than just microprocessors.
For one, they have their own chip sets, their own video cards, they also have their own flash memory division, and also build ARM derivatives (Xscale processors). There is plenty there to break up if they are found to be anti-competitive.
No, you'd remove Intel's vertical integration --- so it would break into a processor core IP company like ARM, into a flash memory company, into a fab company, and so on.
Close to the same way that AT&T was split up --- into a number of retailers, a long-haul company, a product development company and so on. Consumers only noticed the increase in the number of companies offering retail telephony, but the changes went a lot deeper than that and were aimed at destroying AT&T's vertical integration as much as allowing retail competition.
The article specifically states "..that could result in the world's largest processor maker being broken into pieces much as AT&T was.." which could mean any type of split. If a split were to occur, I'd imagine their microprocessor business would be separated from their motherboard, or perhaps domestic and business-grade processors could be separated.
So in a way it is exactly like AT&T. It may get split into different departments, for different target markets.
The old AT&T provided good service, reliable phones and pay phones in areas where people did not have enough access to personal phones. Now after all of the breakups and recombining I can only get DSL from AT&T. Their service sucks and there aren't any pay phone for the poor now. My only other choice is to buy cable from one available company that gives me sixty channels I don't want and goes up every year.
Intel is about the only shining example of American Industry left. Breaking it up would be really stupid.
AMD is such a shining example of a company that stole near bankruptcy from the jaws of market relevance with the excellent due dilligence ole Hector did massively overpaying for ATI. Sad enough he screwed the consumers by taking out one legitimate competitor in the cpu space but he also did a good job hosing another in the gpu space. I wonder how long Intel and European/American governments will keep this constant money losing enterprise afloat. I also wonder how much of a pension Intel is giving Hector for helping its margins with his excellent tenure . This assclown deserves jail time not only for being an incompetent manager but all the insider dealing he was doing as well.
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If the interest rate on the new debt is lower than that on the old (which ought to be the case in the current economic climate), then it *is* sound practice (this holds true in the consumer space too).
What is stupid is replacing one debt with another more expensive one (which is what the likes of Ocean Finance usually do to consumers).
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