European Commission Knock Intel Off Their Perch

Intel face a fine of €1bn for their anti-competitive practices over the last fifteen years, thanks to an EU Commission ruling announced today.

This spells good news for AMD, their chief competitor during this period, and their only remaining serious competitor at the moment, who haven't exactly been doing well over the last couple of years themselves.

The EU Commissions findings were that Intel paid the likes of Dell and HP, who have been the biggest PC manufacturers over the last fifteen years, secret subsidies in exchange for their agreement to almost exclusively ship Intel processors in their systems.

Thinking about the number of Dell PCs that offer AMD processors should give you an idea as to how successful Intel were. HP have always offered a few options, certainly more so in recent years, but the vast majority were running on Intel CPUs.

I for one am extremely pleased to see this ruling go through. I'd been despairing at the decline of AMD, especially in the laptop market, only to see signs of improvement this year with the Turion 64 X2s and duo core mobile Athlons that look like being good choices for value at the moment.

This fine will wipe out most, if not all of Intel's profits year-to-date, and has to be paid within three months. They can and will appeal, but a Supreme Court investigation is to follow and AMD are expected to file their own law suit in the coming weeks.

Further reading:

• Intel pledges to fight €1bn EU fine
• Intel fined record $1.45 billion in AMD antitrust case
• Intel Core 2 Duo Vs. AMD X2 AM2--Top to Bottom
• AMD-Intel dispute over patent licensing heats up
• Intel rated leading chip manufacturer again, AMD slips out of top ten