Posted on Friday, June 13 2014 @ 12:34 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
DailyTech
reports Intel lost its appeal against a 1.06 billion euro (US$1.44 billion) fine levied by the European Commisssion. The appeals court ruled that the fine was appropriate in light of Intel's antitrust offenses which drove up processor prices over a decade ago.
A little over a decade ago the CPU industry was locked in the closing stretch of clock speed wars. Intel Corp.'s (INTC) Pentium processors had long towered over its underdog competitor Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.'s (AMD) designs in performance. But something funny happened: AMD's Athlon project saw success and quite unexpectedly Intel's aging Pentium 4 found itself trailing the second-generation K8 Sledgehammer core (which was inside Athlon 64 and Opteron chip lines).
But the feisty, unheralded AMD chip saw little OEM pickup. And with the switch from a focus on clock speeds to a focus on multicore computing (the so-called "core war" era), Intel's Core-branded chips largely left AMD behind in terms of process, computing speeds, power efficiency, and process. AMD has remained a competitive minority player, but only in the mid-to-low end where it can occasionally beat Intel on account of competitive pricing.
