Did Intel Bribe Dell?
Journalists salivate over courtroom discovery. The raw evidence often lays bare all of the wheelings, dealings, buried bodies and canaries corporate lawyers and PR swallow before the public sees it.
AMD v. Intel, an antitrust claim brought by AMD against Intel and now being prepped for trial in a U.S. District Court in Delaware, so far fits the latter description. Amid more than 150 million pages of evidence there have been moments of courtroom drama, which is like P.T.A. meeting drama. Just this week, Intel was forced to hand over the work product of an internal investigation into documents and e-mails that went missing during the trial (still swallowing canaries). eWEEK's own Scott Ferguson spent the better part of two days reading several hundred pages discussing potential witnesses and came away with little more than tired eyes and a basic understanding of the case AMD intends to make. But the UK's The Register today, May 16, posted that it had unearthed evidence from some of the publicly available documents (most remain hidden from public view and even available docs are covered in black ink to "protect trade secrets") that seems to indicate Intel bribed server and PC makers to keep them from using AMD products. The nut of AMD's case is that Intel used low pricing, comarketing and financial incentives and its weight as the chief chip maker in town to keep server and PC makers from using AMD products. The Register account includes passages from the discovery that smell a lot like a bribe.
And then there's Dell. AMD claims a "river of cash" flowed to Dell from Intel. "Against this backdrop, to say as Intel does that its Dell payments were not conditioned on exclusivity assaults common sense," AMD wrote. More to come ... Redacted and covered in black ink, of course. |


Comments (2)
isn't this standard and accepted practice? Microsoft has done this for well over a decade and they are not covered under the DOJ settlement. Why is Intel expected to act differently? And if this is wrong, will be seeing a bunch of MiB's streaming out for Redmond to help HP, Dell, etc lose any pesky emails or paper trails relating to Microsoft's anti-Linux efforts?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Posted by doog | May 16, 2008 6:31 PM
Eweek:
Why don't you 65-year-old "journalists" promote Chinese business deals for Microsoft? We've been reading about the Chinese "market" for years now on Eweek? I'm missing the weekly pro-Chinese article? You 65-year-old trash whores are obsolete, just like Eweek.
Communist Whores,
Allen Dulles
Posted by Dulles | May 17, 2008 5:48 PM