Sign in

back to article EU appeals overturned $1.2b Intel antitrust fine

The European Commission (EC) is going ahead with an appeal against a court decision earlier this year to drop a $1.2 billion fine imposed against Intel for anti-competitive behavior. The case stretches back many years and concerns deals between Intel and some system vendors to favor Intel chips over those from rivals such as …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. VoiceOfTruth

    Law and the legal system

    A system devised by cunning foxes to drag out as long as possible to ensure the fees for their 'professional advice' keep getting paid. Whoever has the deeper pocket wins.

    6 3 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Law and the legal system

      Laws are to protect the rich (mostly from the poor or poorer).

      6 1 Reply
      1. innominatus
        Reply Icon

        Re: Law and the legal system

        Or nobody wins in the way of Jarndyce and Jarndyce or in the real world the original sub-postmasters compensation swallowed up in legal fees

        2 0 Reply
  2. Rol

    So a rebate that is only paid on condition that the consumer cannot buy an AMD computer from your store is in no way an illegal anticompetitive act, until they find 1 of the 20 million customers who is willing to say, "Yes I would have loved to have bought a cheaper, better AMD machine, but they did not have them in stock"

    This is just madness.

    Why isn't there an anti-justice act that puts the kibosh on such antics.

    I'd love the same to be applied in the UK's supermarkets, who have similar deals going with the big brands, denying choice and ultimate competition. The end game being, the price increases massively as the brand has shut out the competition for good.

    9 2 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    With that amount of money at stake, and over this timescale, would Intel have been finding subtle ways to, ehh, make the court more Intel-friendly as justices retired/died?

    5 1 Reply
    1. JassMan Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      With the amount of money they spent bribing manufacturers and retailers along with the amount it has so far cost in lawyers, they probably could have dropped the price to a point where it compensated for the poorer performance and sold their chips on a level playing field.

      1 0 Reply
  4. msobkow Silver badge

    Unfortuately, if a nation or group of nations does impose a penalty on a multinational that they can't ignore, it just gets dragged out in court for decades, and the multi-national continues on with business as usual, except for being more careful about getting caught.

    5 0 Reply
  5. ShadowSystems Silver badge

    Did we say Billion?

    You've dragged this on for so long it's like you're the SCO of CPU's. We're changing that B to a T & taking it out of your hide. Bend over, this is gonna sting...

    3 0 Reply
    1. dajames Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Did we say Billion?

      You've dragged this on for so long it's like you're the SCO of CPU's. We're changing that B to a T & taking it out of your hide.

      This is an EU ruling, and in European languages the word "billion" is usually understood to mean 1012 rather than 109 anyway.

      That means that a "trillion" would be understood to mean 1018, and I don't think Intel have that much ...

      1 1 Reply
  6. luis river

    Europeans bad and late

    The capitostes EU they are very... clever, (cynicism). A possible fine again Intel shall be for reward injured AMD, dont put up in european pockets

    0 1 Reply
  7. Binraider Silver badge

    The recently reported on case of AMD giving exclusivity to certain system builders; thus putting monopoly pricing on Threadripper 5000 is yet another example of standard practise amongst uncompetitive supply chains.

    If there were a dozen x86-64 vendors no-single operator could gouge the market. Intel are guilty, AMD are guilty, and the whole damn world of monopolies are guilty. So where does the liability end? WIth the voters that put lawmakers in place?

    Actually, there is something to be said about the latter being true.

    0 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like

  • Intel is running rings around AMD and Arm at the edge
    What will it take to loosen the x86 giant's edge stranglehold?
    Tobias Mann Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 14:30 UTC

    Analysis Supermicro launched a wave of edge appliances using Intel's newly refreshed Xeon-D processors last week. The launch itself was nothing to write home about, but a thought occurred: with all the hype surrounding the outer reaches of computing that we call the edge, you'd think there would be more competition from chipmakers in this arena.

    So where are all the AMD and Arm-based edge appliances?

    A glance through the catalogs of the major OEMs – Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Inspur, Supermicro – returned plenty of results for AMD servers, but few, if any, validated for edge deployments. In fact, Supermicro was the only one of the five vendors that even offered an AMD-based edge appliance – which used an ageing Epyc processor. Hardly a great showing from AMD. Meanwhile, just one appliance from Inspur used an Arm-based chip from Nvidia.

    Continue reading
  • TSMC may surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for first time
    Fab frenemies: x86 giant set to give Taiwanese chipmaker more money as it revitalizes foundry business
    Dylan Martin Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 17:01 UTC

    In yet another sign of how fortunes have changed in the semiconductor industry, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC is expected to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for the first time.

    Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance.

    The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC.

    Continue reading
  • Intel withholds Ohio fab ceremony over US chip subsidies inaction
    $20b factory construction start date unchanged – but the x86 giant is not happy
    Dylan Martin Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 23:19 UTC

    Intel has found a new way to voice its displeasure over Congress' inability to pass $52 billion in subsidies to expand US semiconductor manufacturing: withholding a planned groundbreaking ceremony for its $20 billion fab mega-site in Ohio that stands to benefit from the federal funding.

    The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was tentatively scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Ohio manufacturing site with state and federal bigwigs on July 22. But, in an email seen by the newspaper, the x86 giant told officials Wednesday it was indefinitely delaying the festivities "due in part to uncertainty around" the stalled Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.

    That proposed law authorizes the aforementioned subsidies for Intel and others, and so its delay is holding back funding for the chipmakers.

    Continue reading
  • Intel demands $625m in interest from Europe on overturned antitrust fine
    Chip giant still salty
    Tobias Mann Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 19:21 UTC

    Having successfully appealed Europe's €1.06bn ($1.2bn) antitrust fine, Intel now wants €593m ($623.5m) in interest charges.

    In January, after years of contesting the fine, the x86 chip giant finally overturned the penalty, and was told it didn't have to pay up after all. The US tech titan isn't stopping there, however, and now says it is effectively seeking damages for being screwed around by Brussels.

    According to official documents [PDF] published on Monday, Intel has gone to the EU General Court for “payment of compensation and consequential interest for the damage sustained because of the European Commissions refusal to pay Intel default interest."

    Continue reading
  • Intel details advances to make upcoming chips faster, less costly
    X86 giant says it’s on track to regaining manufacturing leadership after years of missteps
    Dylan Martin Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 02:00 UTC

    By now, you likely know the story: Intel made major manufacturing missteps over the past several years, giving rivals like AMD a major advantage, and now the x86 giant is in the midst of an ambitious five-year plan to regain its chip-making mojo.

    This week, Intel is expected to detail just how it's going to make chips in the near future that are faster, less costly and more reliable from a manufacturing standpoint at the 2022 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, which begins on Monday. The Register and other media outlets were given a sneak peek in a briefing last week.

    The details surround Intel 4, the manufacturing node previously known as the chipmaker's 7nm process. Intel plans to use the node for products entering the market next year, which includes the compute tiles for the Meteor Lake CPUs for PCs and the Granite Rapids server chips.

    Continue reading
  • Intel delivers first discrete Arc desktop GPUs ... in China
    Why not just ship it in Narnia and call it a win?
    Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 15 Jun 2022 // 01:38 UTC

    Updated Intel has said its first discrete Arc desktop GPUs will, as planned, go on sale this month. But only in China.

    The x86 giant's foray into discrete graphics processors has been difficult. Intel has baked 2D and 3D acceleration into its chipsets for years but watched as AMD and Nvidia swept the market with more powerful discrete GPU cards.

    Intel announced it would offer discrete GPUs of its own in 2018 and promised shipments would start in 2020. But it was not until 2021 that Intel launched the Arc brand for its GPU efforts and promised discrete graphics silicon for desktops and laptops would appear in Q1 2022.

    Continue reading
  • Linux Foundation thinks it can get you interested in smartNICs
    Step one: Make them easier to program
    Tobias Mann Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 11:00 UTC

    The Linux Foundation wants to make data processing units (DPUs) easier to deploy, with the launch of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project this week.

    The program has already garnered support from several leading chipmakers, systems builders, and software vendors – Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, F5, Keysight, Dell Tech, and Red Hat to name a few – and promises to build an open ecosystem of common software frameworks that can run on any DPU or smartNIC.

    SmartNICs, DPUs, IPUs – whatever you prefer to call them – have been used in cloud and hyperscale datacenters for years now. The devices typically feature onboard networking in a PCIe card form factor and are designed to offload and accelerate I/O-intensive processes and virtualization functions that would otherwise consume valuable host CPU resources.

    Continue reading
  • AMD to end Threadripper Pro 5000 drought for non-Lenovo PCs
    As the House of Zen kills off consumer-friendly non-Pro TR chips
    Dylan Martin Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 23:00 UTC

    A drought of AMD's latest Threadripper workstation processors is finally coming to an end for PC makers who faced shortages earlier this year all while Hong Kong giant Lenovo enjoyed an exclusive supply of the chips.

    AMD announced on Monday it will expand availability of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs to "leading" system integrators in July and to DIY builders through retailers later this year. This announcement came nearly two weeks after Dell announced it would release a workstation with Threadripper Pro 5000 in the summer.

    The coming wave of Threadripper Pro 5000 workstations will mark an end to the exclusivity window Lenovo had with the high-performance chips since they launched in April.

    Continue reading
  • Lenovo reveals small but mighty desktop workstation
    ThinkStation P360 Ultra packs latest Intel Core processor, Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU, support for eight monitors
    Dan Robinson Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 17:14 UTC

    Lenovo has unveiled a small desktop workstation in a new physical format that's smaller than previous compact designs, but which it claims still has the type of performance professional users require.

    Available from the end of this month, the ThinkStation P360 Ultra comes in a chassis that is less than 4 liters in total volume, but packs in 12th Gen Intel Core processors – that's the latest Alder Lake generation with up to 16 cores, but not the Xeon chips that we would expect to see in a workstation – and an Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU.

    Other specifications include up to 128GB of DDR5 memory, two PCIe 4.0 slots, up to 8TB of storage using plug-in M.2 cards, plus dual Ethernet and Thunderbolt 4 ports, and support for up to eight displays, the latter of which will please many professional users. Pricing is expected to start at $1,299 in the US.

    Continue reading
  • AMD bests Intel in cloud CPU performance study
    Overall price-performance in Big 3 hyperscalers a dead heat, says CockroachDB
    Lindsay Clark Thu 16 Jun 2022 // 14:06 UTC

    AMD's processors have come out on top in terms of cloud CPU performance across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, according to a recently published study.

    The multi-core x86-64 microprocessors Milan and Rome and beat Intel Cascade Lake and Ice Lake instances in tests of performance in the three most popular cloud providers, research from database company CockroachDB found.

    Using the CoreMark version 1.0 benchmark – which can be limited to run on a single vCPU or execute workloads on multiple vCPUs – the researchers showed AMD's Milan processors outperformed those of Intel in many cases, and at worst statistically tied with Intel's latest-gen Ice Lake processors across both the OLTP and CPU benchmarks.

    Continue reading

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022

Do not sell my personal information Cookies Privacy Ts&Cs