Intel Refutes Decade-Old Fine for Anticompetitive Practices Against AMD

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

Intel continues to challenge the EU over a decade-old antitrust fine.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Way back in 2009, the EU placed a €1.06 billion ($1.2 billion) fine on Intel for anti-competitive practices against AMD. For the years since, a back-and-forth battle has endured. Today, Intel claimed that the fine laid on by the EU's antitrust regulators is flawed, as reported by Reuters. 

The charges against Intel are that it attempted to block AMD's growth in the market by offering PC makers, such as Dell and HP, incentives to purchase most of its CPUs from Intel. Intel paid the fine in full in 2009; however, in 2014, Intel challenged the EU General Court's Commission on the decision. Following extensive assessment, the General Court upheld the fine. 

In 2017, however, Intel took the case to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU). The EJEU disagreed with the General Court's decision in 2014 and ordered the general court to re-examine the case yet again. This process has been running up until today. 

“The Commission either took a wrong approach in its decision or it carried out an as efficient competitor (AEC) test and it got it wrong,” Intel's lawyer, Daniel Bear, said to a panel of judges at the General Court in a re-hearing of the case, Reuters reported today. 

In response, GC Commission lawyer Nicholas Khan said, "That was assessed very exhaustively in 2014. Intel’s request is a second bite at the cherry."

No consensus has been reached yet. Although the French consumer body UFC is backing the General Court, the Association for Competitive Technology is siding with Intel. 

A judgment is expected to be announced next year, though the losing party will be able to, once again, appeal the case to the CJEU.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • gdmaclew
    Well, here we go again.
    Does Intel really think they did nothing wrong?
    I bet it turned off a whole generation of potential Intel users and placed them firmly in the Red camp even if they weren't leaning that way.
    I suspect that the further we get away from the actual offence, the less propensity there will be to uphold this judgement against Intel. Besides, hey, AMD is doing alright now so what's the beef, right?

    The motivation for Intel to continue this charade has probably changed from pure malice to "now that AMD is doing well and is a threat to us, let's just punch them in the face".

    If this gets reversed it will embolden Intel (not that they need any help).
    Reply
  • Deicidium369
    No one other than the AMD camp cared about this - if it turned off an entire generation AMD sure wasn't able to capitalize on it - but that's the AMD story. And not like the EU ever overreaches.
    I know all the AMD kiddies think that both Intel and Nvidia are evil and destroying something something - if that was the case then AMD should have 90% market share rather than the single digits they have now.

    As far as emboldening Intel if this is overturned - OEMs are staying away from AMD because their customers don't want them. Why buy something "as good as Intel" when Intel exists.

    AMD serves an extremely useful service to Intel - allows Intel to say they are not a monopoly - "look at AMD"...
    Reply
  • stuff and nonesense
    Deicidium369 said:
    No one other than the AMD camp cared about this - if it turned off an entire generation AMD sure wasn't able to capitalize on it - but that's the AMD story. And not like the EU ever overreaches.
    I know all the AMD kiddies think that both Intel and Nvidia are evil and destroying something something - if that was the case then AMD should have 90% market share rather than the single digits they have now.

    As far as emboldening Intel if this is overturned - OEMs are staying away from AMD because their customers don't want them. Why buy something "as good as Intel" when Intel exists.

    AMD serves an extremely useful service to Intel - allows Intel to say they are not a monopoly - "look at AMD"...


    A number of court cases concluded that intel actively blocked OEMs from using AMD processors. The method was reported as being a threat/promise to:
    Remove"discounts" applied against the purchase of intel hardware. The OEMs of the day couldn't easily afford this and would have gone out of business.
    Remove R&D support (and offer to further support the other OEMs...Intel, by doing this stifled competition and removed options from consumers. AMD were denied access to some Tier 1 vendors e.g. Dell.

    Would AMD have made a fortune given access to these markets? Who knows. Could AMD have fulfilled larger demands on its production? Who knows.

    The EU, Japan, Korea and the State of New York (link https://phys.org/news/2009-11-ny-antitrust-intel.html) all investigated intel's practices. Overreaching EU?

    HP, Dell, Lenovo are 3 OEMs that today are using AMD Zen based processors in their products.
    Which OEMs are avoiding AMD?

    Market share. Bulldozer was not competitive with Core i7 or core i5. It takes time and sustained development to rebuild trust. AMD aren't doing badly with Zen. Navi, we will have to see.

    AMD is serving an extremely useful service to CONSUMERS, it is providing a choice. If you want to see why that is important then look back a few years at intel pricing.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    stuff and nonesense said:
    A number of court cases concluded that intel actively blocked OEMs from using AMD processors. The method was reported as being a threat/promise to:
    Remove"discounts" applied against the purchase of intel hardware. The OEMs of the day couldn't easily afford this and would have gone out of business.
    Remove R&D support (and offer to further support the other OEMs...Intel, by doing this stifled competition and removed options from consumers. AMD were denied access to some Tier 1 vendors e.g. Dell.

    Would AMD have made a fortune given access to these markets? Who knows. Could AMD have fulfilled larger demands on its production? Who knows.

    The EU, Japan, Korea and the State of New York (link https://phys.org/news/2009-11-ny-antitrust-intel.html) all investigated intel's practices. Overreaching EU?

    HP, Dell, Lenovo are 3 OEMs that today are using AMD Zen based processors in their products.
    Which OEMs are avoiding AMD?

    Market share. Bulldozer was not competitive with Core i7 or core i5. It takes time and sustained development to rebuild trust. AMD aren't doing badly with Zen. Navi, we will have to see.

    AMD is serving an extremely useful service to CONSUMERS, it is providing a choice. If you want to see why that is important then look back a few years at intel pricing.
    The accused period is 2002-2007,if they are true then AMD thrived despite of what intel allegedly did.
    AMD shot themselves in the foot in 2006 by spending all their money on buying ATI
    so much so that they were forced to sell their own foundries in 2008

    problem was they had no right to sell their IP because it wasn't theirs to begin with,both intel and AMD got the rights to produce x86 by IBM.
    The only reason AMD started this lawsuit was to get some leverage to sell their foundries.

    If intel really wanted to hurt AMD then intel wouldn't have settled,in america everybody pays for their own costs in court so intel could have dragged this thing out until AMD would have run out of money,which would have been a very short time.
    stuff and nonesense said:
    Market share. Bulldozer was not competitive with Core i7 or core i5. It takes time and sustained development to rebuild trust. AMD aren't doing badly with Zen. Navi, we will have to see.
    AMD isn't doing badly but they aren't doing well either.They had a big decrease in revenue due to them announcing ZEN, nobody was buying AMD because they were waiting on ZEN and they only got back to the level of revenue they had when bulldozer first released.


    stuff and nonesense said:
    AMD is serving an extremely useful service to CONSUMERS, it is providing a choice. If you want to see why that is important then look back a few years at intel pricing.
    If you want to see how true your statement is then just look at current intel pricing,it has remained the same and even increased,you are getting more cores but the price levels are the same and higher.
    And the core count for intel only increased to the level it would have been if AMD wasn't dropping the ball all those years.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    TerryLaze said:
    problem was they had no right to sell their IP because it wasn't theirs to begin with,both intel and AMD got the rights to produce x86 by IBM.
    Huh? x86 IP is owned by Intel, x86-64 IP by AMD. IBM used the 8088 in one of their PCs and told Intel they'd need to license the IP to someone else so IBM could dual source the parts, but they never owned the x86 IP.

    TerryLaze said:
    If you want to see how true your statement is then just look at current intel pricing,it has remained the same and even increased,you are getting more cores but the price levels are the same and higher.
    And the core count for intel only increased to the level it would have been if AMD wasn't dropping the ball all those years.
    Upping the core count for a given price is equivalent to dropping the price. A 4C/8T Intel chip cost ~$350 for roughly 7 years, dropping to ~$150 over the course of about 3 years (once comet lake comes out). A 10 core HEDT CPU went from $1700 to $1000 to $600 over the course of 4 years. Whether those CPUs are called i3 or i7 or whatever doesn't really matter.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    TJ Hooker said:
    Huh? x86 IP is owned by Intel, x86-64 IP by AMD. IBM used the 8088 in one of their PCs and told Intel they'd need to license the IP to someone else so IBM could dual source the parts, but they never owned the x86 IP.
    Same difference,the point is AMD did not have any legal right to to license the IP to someone else.
    Look at the delaware papers it's listed as a major point.
    TJ Hooker said:
    Upping the core count for a given price is equivalent to dropping the price. A 4C/8T Intel chip cost ~$350 for roughly 7 years, dropping to ~$150 over the course of about 3 years (once comet lake comes out). A 10 core HEDT CPU went from $1700 to $1000 to $600 over the course of 4 years. Whether those CPUs are called i3 or i7 or whatever doesn't really matter.
    Yeah like I said those are naturally occurring things,intel made the celerons dual core, put overclocking on a pentium,made a pentium with HTT enable overclocking on i3,all of this before AMD came out with ZEN.
    It's what I'm saying, the chips intel gives us now are the chips we would have gotten years ago if AMD weren't so far behind.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    TerryLaze said:
    Yeah like I said those are naturally occurring things,intel made the celerons dual core, put overclocking on a pentium,made a pentium with HTT enable overclocking on i3,all of this before AMD came out with ZEN.
    Celerons have been dual core since "Core i" came out in ~2010, the beginning of the 7 year period I was referring to. Unlocked Pentium was a one time anniversary edition item that was little more than a curiosity. HT Pentium and unlocked i3 only happened a couple months before Ryzen came out.
    TerryLaze said:
    It's what I'm saying, the chips intel gives us now are the chips we would have gotten years ago if AMD weren't so far behind.
    Ok, so you agree that Intel increasing the performance per dollar of their products (in terms of offering more cores for the money) is only because AMD exists as competition (if AMD had always been competitive we would have got it sooner, instead we only got it recently). Which is exactly what the person you were responding to was saying, that having a competitive AMD is a great thing for consumers who want more for their dollar.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    TJ Hooker said:
    Ok, so you agree that Intel increasing the performance per dollar of their products (in terms of offering more cores for the money) is only because AMD exists as competition (if AMD had always been competitive we would have got it sooner, instead we only got it recently).
    Which is exactly what the person you were responding to was saying, that having a competitive AMD is a great thing for consumers who want more for their dollar.
    Yes, we only get those tiny improvements because otherwise AMD would go out of business,if intel would release 10nm now AMD would be done,they barely make as much money with ZEN as they did with Bulldozer.

    If intel only had their own older models as competition they would be forced to make a decently better system for people to buy the newer system and two more cores per generation would be a decent enough improvement for enough people for intel to turn a good profit.

    So personally I doubt that there would be much change,intel is still only competing with themselves even with ZEN on the market,I mean AMD makes shy of 7 million even though "everybody" buys ZEN.
    Reply
  • bytebullets
    All I know is I bought an AMD cpu back in 2010, had to underclock it to get it to run windows in a stable fashion. Found out that it couldn't support visual studio and some code development so I sold it and never looked back. Looking at intel's process for building a cpu vs AMD's process, intel chips will obviously last longer hands down. AMD is going to have to build a cpu that is leaps and bounds (y'know a magnitude or so) above intel's before I ever buy and try another one. Based on past experience, I'm not expecting much.
    Reply