Intel, AMD to Bury Antitrust Hatchet; Intel to Pay $1.25b | Hacker News Reader

Intel, AMD to Bury Antitrust Hatchet; Intel to Pay $1.25b

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35 pointsasnyder14 comments

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Great for the duopoly.

Maybe not so great for companies getting locked out of the market (like Nvidia).

Also Via is probably left out in the cold.

Good news for AMD stockholders(stock is already up 20%+).

VIA/Centaur settled a patent lawsuit with Intel a few years ago and got a 10-year license.

Let's hope more and more free and open-source software make x86 compatibility a need of the past.

Yeah, I can't help but think this new cross-licensing agreement contains clauses to prevent AMD from sub-licensing. e.g. to nVidia.

Why else would Intel give up so quickly and completely? Clearly they're getting something out of this that's worth at least 1.2B to them.

Maybe Intel saw something worse coming down the line from the courts.

I know that the EU's fines on Microsoft have certainly set them straight; within a few weeks of the levying of billions in penalties, Microsoft had a sudden change of heart on the default browsing modes in IE8 and released thousands of pages in additional format specifications, etc.

Yea getting hit by anti-trust laws can be damn costly to a company.

Avoiding spending more money on litigation has to be a win for everyone, including the customers of these companies.

But what about the chi^H^H^Hlawyers?

I wonder how comparable this agreement will be to the one signed between Microsoft and Apple that ended their legal battles over "look and feel." They signed patent cross-licensing agreements about five years later.

But the agreement came when Apple had all but lost the PC market to Microsoft--the agreement was Apple's way of capitulating and Microsoft allowing Apple to save face.

What does this mean for the Intel monopoly position in the market?

Right now, Intel can easily maintain their position on products alone -- the only place AMD can compete is on the low end, and even there Intel can cut prices to where AMD just can't compete if Intel feels like it.

All the anticompetitive stuff happened when AMD genuinely had the better product, and until that happens again, I doubt anything will happen to Intel's position.

Let's just hope that it DOES happen again!

That money will be redirected to investors. Btw, AMD holds a debt of comparable size.

Their debt is about $3.7 billion http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/14/amd-debt-spansion-markets-e..., so this only partially helps.

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