Intel inside (everything)
I wonder if this could have anything to do with why Apple suddenly deciding to put Intel chips in all its hardware?
The European Commission has found Intel guilty of anti-competitive behaviour and fined it over a billion euros. The Commission has ordered the chip giant to refrain from any equivalent practises in the future. It ruled the firm damaged competition by excluding rival AMD from markets. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said …
...would be if Intel products were subject to an embargo until arrangements to pay the fine were worked out.
As far as Intel's "mischievous" behavior, would you enjoy it if you lost your job or didn't get a job you applied for because someone bribed the CEO to screw you over?
This sort of thing has been going on for decades in the US. 20 years ago I was working on a graphics terminal project. At that point we were basically an Intel shop, but we had National Semi & Motorola in to show their new CPUs. As a programmer, I much preferred either the Nat Semi or Moto parts, because they were much cleaner designs and were not limited to 64K memory segments for a product that needed more than 64K for screen memory. But our preferences got vetoed by the head of hardware engineering, and I ultimately found out why-- Intel engineers stepped in and gave them the complete hardware design fror the project so our engineers didn't have to do anything but put their name on it. Intel made it totally easy to be a hardware engineer for intel products, as they would do your work for you, so no wonder they always chose Intel. Is that anti-competitive? I'm not sure, but it always did seem to me to be a bit underhanded, and at least, we could have fired all our own hardware engineers if upper management had known about it...
@Bassey: No, AMD are not the injured party. Or if they are injured, then they can perfectly well sue Intel themselves. The EU is taking this action because anti-competitive behaviour costs us, the consumers, money. So it's right that the money goes to the EU (thus reducing our taxes) rather than to other chip manufacturers.