AMD suit ensures Intel keeps IT clean

Intel and AMD have long regarded each other with the gimlet eye of Judy spotting Punch trousering the sausages. Now AMD has renewed hostilities and filed suit against Intel, depicting it as an abuser of monopolistic status. But, public sparring apart, will any of this have an effect on the real world of people buying PCs?

Rumours of Intel’s dark dealings have long circulated but until now details have remained scarce. It has been a pretty open secret that Intel has long sponsored PC makers’ marketing with soft dollars without which the market would have been even more of a blood-bath. And there has always been a lot of blather about Intel’s heavy-handed treatment of companies that ran a dual-supplier strategy or trod near its branding. Certainly, it was sharply about its business with a cease-and-desist missive when Cyrix, a former PC chip contender, displayed signs on a conference booth that mocked the “Intel Inside” logo by replacing it with “Cyrix Instead”.

There is a long and often amusing history of disputes between Intel and AMD, dating back to Intel’s decision not to broadly license designs from the 386 processor in the late 1980s. AMD complained that although it had a cross-licensing agreement with Intel, information on designs often arrived in a poor state or with pages missing.

Intel and AMD even had their day in court over naming conventions, with AMD lawyers successfully arguing that numbers could not be copyrighted. That led to AMD and others being able to market 386 and 486 chips – and Intel introducing the Pentium nomenclature.

Both colourful characters, Intel leader Andy Grove and AMD oppo Jerry Sanders were like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men transferred to the Big Brother house.

Grove’s theory – perhaps born of his background escaping the Hungarian pogrom – was evinced in the title of his book Only The Paranoid Survive. Referring to the notorious miming pop stars he called AMD “the Milli Vanilli of semiconductors”.

Sanders, a lover of the good things in life and ringer for – but no relation to – Colonel Sanders of KFC fame, was outgoing and eccentric. When AMD won the right to make 386 clones, he cited the poet Robert Browning – “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

This latest tussle might not be so funny for Intel as AMD has some interesting allegations. They include Michael Capellas, when chief executive of Compaq, saying Intel had put a “gun to his head” by withholding delivery of chips; Gateway saying Intel “had beaten them into guacamole”; and Intel’s former chief executive Craig Barrett threatening Acer with “severe consequences” if it supported an AMD launch.

To the man on the Clapham omnibus, this would suggest Intel has crossed the line and should have its behaviour controlled. But whatever the ravings of AMD fanboys, Intel has been the dominant provider for generations of PCs that fall in price as they rise in performance, and fiduciary demands mandate it plays to the limits of the law. AMD, like Linux to Microsoft in software, is already a powerful check on Intel’s pricing and prods it to keep the performance pedal to the metal. Any legal verdict will bring more joy to lawyers than IT buyers.

‹ martin_veitch@vnu.co.uk