AMD and Intel – new deal, war is over

20th November, 2009 by Adina
Tags: , ,

AMD and Intel made a surprising deal and ended their disputes regarding antitrust and patent cross-licensing, respectively. This way, AMD gives up its lawsuits against Intel in the United States and Japan, as well as the “regulatory complaints” worldwide. Intel, in exchange, will pay AMD $1.25 billion and will accept a renewed set of business practices. The two companies agreed to have a five-year deal of cross-licensing each other’s technology. This deal does not affect immediately the New York antitrust case or the $1.45 billion European fine case, but surely does eliminate one very strong argument in these two and other two Japanese cases. AMD has often accused Intel of unfair practice when it tried to exclude AMD from the market by applying several doubtful tactics, such as price dumping, threatening some firms with retaliation if they promoted AMD systems or even paying PC builders to limit, going up to completely exclude AMD products from their line-ups.

AMD claims that the new business practice will prevent Intel from selling its products by excluding AMD or by offering payments to third parties in order to keep AMD out. In addition, Intel will also stop writing code compilers or other kind of code meant to slow down AMD hardware artificially. The new agreement does no more require AMD to treat its GlobalFoundries as a subsidiary. Cross-licensing will be broad enough to address all technologies and not only the x86 processors and chipsets that have lead to these disputes.

AMD and Intel are expected to clarify certain aspects of their recent deal by explaining the moves they intend to do in the future.


  • Share/Bookmark

 

Readers Comments