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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

I think it's because the case hinged on the outcome, not on the practice itself. The suit alleged that Intel had "killed" AMD with this practice and brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. The issue is, Intel is getting their asses handed to them right now by AMD so the argument seems pretty hollow in 2022.

I am not saying this is good or bad, but that's the intuition behind the reversal I think.

EDIT: Please don't shoot the messenger, I am just offering a conjecture, I am not even European or American.

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It's kind of hilarious, they had to stop the practice, and immediately somehow AMD is resurrected (because they can actually compete now), and so the fine no longer applies. If anything it proves that the practice was harmful.

AMD was shipping inferior chips back then, now its Intel that is selling shit. Intel also seems to have been hit much harder by the new class of hardware vulns wiping out proportionally more of their historic advantage. I'd guess that 85% of the turn around has been because of differences in their offerings.

>AMD was shipping inferior chips back then

But this is false. The reason Intel had to pay laptop OEMs to not use AMD's chips in the first place, was because in the time window in question (2003-2006, before the core2* family), AMD's chips were superior.

To me it feels like the original fine may have influenced by that. It would have discouraged Intel from offering these rebates to OEMs, giving AMD a chance to slowly get back into laptops. At the time Intel's mobile CPUs were far superior, but the same could not be said for their integrated GPUs, but IIRC the rebates required that OEMs go full Intel (CPU, GPU, chipset, and WiFi).

This doesn't particularly make sense. You can't even use non Intel chipsets with Intel CPUs and integrated GPUs are inherently tied to the CPU. (In the case of the discrete GPU segment, Intel didn't even have an offering.) The only place where alternatives are even technically possible are in WiFi where there is no impact on AMD.

> You can't even use non Intel chipsets with Intel CPUs

There's no theoretical reason for this. Nobody makes them because they won't be able to sell them, apparently, but they could make them.

> You can't even use non Intel chipsets with Intel CPUs and integrated GPUs are inherently tied to the CPU.

You used to be able to, but Intel cut off the rights to use their chipsets' interconnect. Before that point 'integrated on the chipset' was a valid way to do integrated graphics.

The last AMD chipset that supported Intel CPUs[1] was around the time of this fine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_690_chipset_series

"They didn't entirely succeed in their aims" seems like really terrible reasoning to me, and also has really bad long term consequences. If I'm a massive market leader like Intel then, I now have all the incentives in the world to use disgusting underhanded tactics to bury my competition. Worst case scenario, they get severely weakened like AMD was for years and I face no legal consequences. Best case scenario, I kill my only competitor and face a paltry $1B fine.

If they are in fact using the reasoning you think they are, then they are even bigger idiots than I had previously thought.

> I think it's because the case hinged on the outcome, not on the practice itself.

Yeah it sounds like it. My understanding from the summaries is that the commission failed to quantify the damage with enough accuracy and certainty. It sucks.

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