Intel and AMD today settled all of their various patent and antitrust disputes, with the top chipmaker paying out $1.25 billion to settle more than two decades of litigation. The two companies will also cross-license their technology over the next five years. The move helps Intel far more than AMD, as Intel is likely to retain its dominant position in the chip market. But Intel will continue to face government antitrust investigations over its pricing practices, and there’s still an intellectual property suit with Nvidia to deal with.
However, Intel can’t really afford to let AMD die because it then becomes a monopoly, and governments love to interfere with monopolies. So in a sense, Intel is propping AMD up only to knock it down again in the competitive market.
This is a great deal for Intel – they caught AMD in a state of desperation, sadly. Just look at AMD’s balance sheet, and compare it’s fortunes with Intel’s over the last three years.
The is an interesting and at the same time, funny take.
I am more a fan of AMD than intel. Because AMD is cheaper but still performs just as well. Or maybe I just want to root for the underdog. yaiks!
If they didn’t sort this out, Intel wouldn’t be able to make Dual/Quad cores CPUs anymore, or the i5/i7 CPUs either… so we’d all go back to P3s. And AMD would have to come up with their own CPU architecture. So yeah, they really needed to figure this out. Glad to see that they did.