AMD Wins Another Round Against Intel

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During 2005 and 2006, AMD won a good portion of business away from Intel in the server chip market (BusinessWeek.com, 3/6/06). It also landed its chips in computers from both Dell and Toshiba, both of which for many years had used only Intel chips (BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/07).

PC Vendors Not So Fearful of Intel

McCoy says at least some of those successes came in the wake of regulatory action. PC vendors are proving more willing to use AMD chips because they're less afraid of retaliation from Intel, he says. "There is an emerging consensus around the world that Intel is coercing customers to avoid doing business with us and that this is hurting consumer choice," McCoy says. More recently, AMD has floundered (BusinessWeek.com, 4/8/08).

This is not the first time Intel has tangled with the FTC. In the late 1990s, the FTC accused Intel of withholding key technical information about its chips from Digital Equipment Corp. and Compaq, (both now units of Hewlett-Packard) as well as Intergraph. The three all had key patents related to microprocessors for which Intel had sought licenses. When the companies tried to enforce their patents, Intel held back information the companies would need to build new computers as a means of coercing them to license the patents in question.

Intel settled in 1999 with only a day before trial was scheduled to begin. Settlement talks began after a tennis game between Intel attorney Michael Sohn and then FTC antitrust chief William Baer.

Since then, especially in the wake of the Justice Dept.'s case against Microsoft (MSFT), antitrust case law has been altered in such a way that the FTC is more likely to play hardball with Intel: "This time I think they're going to take a cold hard look at Intel's conduct," Balto says. "The first time antitrust law didn't recognize the potential anticompetitive harm from this kind of conduct and how it might be illegal."

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.