Intel sees the light ... maybe

[unixronin]

Intel and AMD just settled their autitrust and patent-licensing disputes.  ...For now.  Hopefully it'll last this time.

Under the new agreement, AMD and Intel have agreed to drop all past patent cross-licensing disputes, enter a new five-year patent cross-licensing pact, and terminate all current antitrust and patent-infringement litigation worldwide.  The agreement also ends Intel's opposition to the GlobalFoundries spin-off, and frees up GlobalFoundries to pursue fab business for non-AMD customers.  Additionally, Intel will pay AMD a $1.25 billion penalty and has agreed to abide by "a set of business practice provisions" that basically amounts to halting its widespread practice of using bribes, kickbacks, and threats of supply restrictions to encourage computer manufacturers to reduce their business with AMD.

This has been along time coming.  Perhaps Intel finally Gets It that playing this kind of dirty pool only hurts their image and leads potential customers to question Intel's ability to compete on the strength of its products alone.

Intel has very good products.  So does AMD.  If Intel and AMD compete fairly on their merits, they will drive a continuing mutual improvement in their products, which can only be good both for them and for everyone else.  We need only look at Microsoft to see how this drive to improve is lacking in a monopoly-dominated market.

(The Detroit auto industry is a different case.  GM, Ford and Chrysler may not have been a single monopolistic company, but in many ways, the way they've designed and built cars for the last half-century, they might as well have been.  The key factor there was not near-monopoly control of the US auto market, though, but more the handing over of final authority on engineering decisions from the engineers who wanted to make the product better, to the accountants who wanted only to shave every last nickel out of it, combined with a lack of incentive to build more efficient engines because US gasoline was so cheap for so long.)

This is a new page for Intel and AMD.  Let's hope they stay with it.

Comments

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

They will not change until the upper third of the company is broken then killed and their families made destitute. Even then they won't change but maybe I'd feel a tad better.

Wanna bet they fed the info on the AMD payout to the right people? Wanna bet that all this scrutiny abates?

Come on it's only money.