Intel is being eaten alive by its competitors, including AMD. Seems overly punitive and detached from reality.
The only reason why they're floundering now is that Lisa Su resurrected AMD and built a star team of CPU designers that are kicking Intel's ass. However, that is not a reason to ignore antitrust as "outdated regulation". If anything, AMD is doing a some of the same shit Intel did when they were dominant, because that's just how the CPU market works now, itself because we let Intel set the standard of behavior a decade ago by failing to punish them for cheating.
Anyway, that's why we need more overly punitive fines detached from reality.
$1 billion fine seems like a lot, but let's assume $100/CPU, 50% profit margin and 5 years (2002-2007). 1000_000_0000 / 100 / 2 / 5 = 1 000 000. So you would need to sell 1 million CPUs to make a $1 billion profit over 5 years. Eminently doable on EU laptop market, even back then.
Definitely doesn't seem disproportionate.
All CPUs today are RISC descendants: yes, even Intel and AMD's x86.
The first "not actually a CISC x86 at all internally, but 100% a RISC" was the Pentium Pro (1995, and recycled a lot of work put into the i960, thanks to Fred Pollack), and AMD's first real[1] CPUs weren't x86 but a RISC descendant called the AM29k, which when they slapped an x86 decoder on it and it became the original K5 (1996), which sometimes won benchmarks against the Pentium, especially on code that wouldn't take advantage of the Pentium dual ALU design; the AM29k/K5's OoOE was superior due to it's RISC nature.
So, although, yes, technically there is a x86 duopoly, but x86 kind of ceased to exist meaningfully in the 90s. It is a RISC descendant monopoly, and whoever is in the lead at any given moment is who has the best fab tech; currently it's a fist fight between two Jim Keller architectures (he worked on both AMD's Zen and PASemi's ARM family) both using top tier TSMC tech. Jim Keller himself is a very accomplished RISC jockey, and I absolutely respect him and any team he's been part of.
[1] Depending on how you define real; the team that left Intel after management screwed them and started AMD, reverse engineered and reimplemented the CPU that put Intel on the map, the 8080, called the Am9080, after making a lot of "bag of chips" sort of ICs that weren't CPUs. All the other CPUs between that and the AM29k were second source chips under license.
But the important part is that Intel stopped doing those things after the investigation started so that AMD could compete. If they didn't it would be very easy to prove that they are anti competitive. So even though the fines are late the effects have already been here for a long time with AMD doing well today.
A lot of online apps tend to operate at a loss to gain a large audience and then once they've gained market share they often increase fees or more generally make it more expensive for users. Their business model forces smaller competitors out because a larger funded company can in theory hold out for a longer period of time at a loss.
It's surprising this is ok but selling a piece of hardware at a loss is not ok. What about Costco selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store or the idea of a "loss leader"?
> What about Costco selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store or the idea of a "loss leader"?
Isn't the usual argument that they got surplus stock in some way? Then it isn't below cost, it is loss minimization from a bad investment, and it doesn't hurt competition for chicken since it is a limited amount of time.
Also, it isn't limited amount of time. This has been Costco's MO for decades.
Have they sold chicken at below cost for decades with no stop? Really? I think you mean they have sold small portions of their wares at below cost, not that they have sold a specific thing at below cost for extended amounts of time.
> Whether you have 100 chickens or 100 million, if they cost you $6 and you sell them for $5, that's below cost.
Yeah, but the store as a whole isn't selling at below cost, and on average since those chickens aren't sold at below cost all the time they still make money from chickens. Those things means that on average the store is net positive, and them selling chickens is a net positive. Hence overall they don't sell anything at a net loss, its just for short periods of time they do it and those can be hand waved away. There are a lot of laws surrounding limited time offers that they have to follow.
Intel stock is a lot of things, but 'up 80%' hasn't been something true since the early 2000s.
ETA: That was 16 years ago I was thinking of, I forgot about the nasty dip in 2008. I misremembered, it was ~26 when I was hired, dipped to 18 the next year, and slowly climbed a while and has been around that $30/share number for ages.
At the very least, if AMD had been able to maintain competition for longer, would we have been stuck at 2/4 cores for so long? Still struggling to make ECC RAM mainstream?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
We have to remember that Intel went all in on Itanium and it was AMD who made 64bit happen. They absolutely kicked Intels ass on performance and price for quite a while but were not able to leverage that.
So yes, the future would have been quite different.