Intel Accused of Giving Dell $6 Billion in Perks
Intel is accused of giving PC makers substantial amounts of money in exchange for exclusivity.
The State of New York has filed a lawsuit against Intel accusing the chipmaker of paying vendors billions of dollars in rebates to not use AMD chips. Xbitlabs reports that IBM, Dell and HP are among the companies that received rebates, with Dell receiving roughly $6 billion over five years.
According to lawsuit, Dell was paid rebates based on how many CPUs it bought. Xbit reports that the percentage of the rebate could fluctuate and it reached 16 percent while Dell contemplated using AMD chips. Dell allegedly received $6 billion dollars between 2002 and 2007 and the Wall Street Journal reports that these payments sometimes exceeded Dell's profits with payments for one fiscal quarter constituting 116 percent of Dell's reported net income.
The news following an EU decision to impose hefty fines upon Intel for anticompetitive practices. Intel offered similar rebates in the European market and paid vendors to delay or cancel the launch of AMD products. The European Union fined the company €3.45 billion in May of this year.
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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nforce4max That explains the flood of Pentium4s that so saturated the PC market and is impossible to avoid unless you only work on macs.Reply -
Parsian Suffer Intel, you don't deserve where you are. When AMD was ahead in performance, they werent gaining anything because Intel's practices.Reply -
830hobbes NICE! I'm no AMD fanboy, just a gamer who likes good competition to lower prices. Also, as an AMD stockholder this is awesome. Intel is ridiculous with this shit.Reply -
hellwig Was it Tuan that tried defending this practice? Something about how its the OEMs choice what processors to use in their computers? Funny, it seems the government agrees with us consumers, that its out choice what processors we want to use, and that its illegal for Intel to basically buy off the OEMs, preventing their competitor from reaching market int he first place.Reply
Of course, it doesn't seem like Intel cares one way or another, they already got busted for this in the first place in the 90's, which led to AMD keeping their x86 license permanently. Maybe this time AMD gets free license to the latest Nehalim tech too. -
7amood since there is not much competition form AMD, I hope they won't try to get the 6Bs back from us in the coming years.Reply