AMD revives antitrust allegations against Intel

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday resurrected its old allegations against Intel, although it kept the salacious details under a thick layer of black ink.

AMD filed a heavily redacted brief as part of its ongoing antitrust case against Intel, saying it has new, specific evidence of Intel's misconduct but blacking out almost all of the evidence in the brief. AMD filed suit in 2005, claiming that Intel has used intimidation and predatory pricing to coerce PC and server vendors into excluding AMD's chips from their products. Intel denies all charges.

In its initial complaint, AMD claimed to have evidence of Intel's wrongdoing but has never shared specific allegations against individuals, or explained exactly how Intel's tactics were deployed. Now, it claims to have at least shared them with the court, although because specific individuals are named the redactions are apparently necessarily. The document is pretty much unreadable; I liked The Register's take on it.

Despite AMD's claims that it cites "chapter and verse" in the brief, as AMD's chief lawyer told The Wall Street Journal, the footnotes of the brief appear to be signals of who AMD needs to depose to prove its allegations. For example, following the first section in which AMD apparently lays out specific (if redacted) complaints involving Intel's dealings with Dell, the company's lawyers write: "Plaintiffs will likely need to depose witnesses from various levels of the Intel and Dell organizations to establish that interesting.

AMD's Puma ready to pounce

This time around, AMD is ready with a major product launch on schedule, and is enjoying a bit of good fortune as well.

Notebook makers of all stripes are getting ready to launch systems based on AMD's Puma notebook technology, which consists of a new processor, a mobile chipset, and wireless chips from AMD's partners. The official announcement is expected to come later Wednesday at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, and notebooks with the chips will be arriving over the next several weeks from companies like Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, said Bahr Mahony, director of AMD's mobile business

Assuming those notebooks ship without incident, Puma arrives in far better shape than Barcelona, the quad-core server processor that was a year late after running into major technical glitches. Puma also arrives at a time when Intel has suffered a rare--at least over the last two years--gaffe inside its notebook group: the company's Montevina notebook platform will be delayed several weeks with chipset problems, which could affect Intel's performance during the important back-to-school shopping season.

AMD's new Turion X2 Ultra processor is the first designed-for-mobile processor that AMD has ever produced; the earlier versions of its Turion processor were essentially the same design as its Opteron design with a more power-friendly implementation. But the PC market is shifting dramatically in favor of the notebook over the desktop as mobility becomes all the rage, and Intel has enjoyed a strong position in this market.

AMD Reportedly Cancels Dual-Core 10th Generation Microprocessors

AMD Rumoured to Cancel Dual-Core AMD Phenom Chips :

Advanced Micro Devices plans to cancel introduction of dual-core AMD Phenom microprocessors based on its latest generation K10 micro-architecture and made using current process technology. The reasons for the decision are not completely clear, but it is highly likely that the company decided to reduce its development costs amid uncertain profitability of such chips.

A news-story published by HKEPC web-site claims that AMD had informed its partners among mainboard makers that it had cancelled plans to release dual-core AMD Phenom code-named Kuma microprocessor based on K10 micro-architecture. The company reportedly indicated that dual-core chips featuring the latest design would be made using 45nm process technology, which will emerge late in 2008.

The code-named Kuma chips would be able to improve competitive positions of AMD’s dual-core lineup, however, potential difficulties with increasing clock-speeds of dual-core K10 might lead to decision to cancel the product. As a result, AMD will have to keep supplying aging K8 micro-architecture powered AMD Athlon 64 X2 chips, which first emerged on the market back in 2005, for many months from now.

At present AMD’s product lineup seems to be considerable weaker compared to that of Intel Corp., primarily due to relatively low performance of higher-end models and inability to compete for the market of most expensive microprocessors. While more competitive dual-core offerings would boost AMD’s product family, this could not improve the company’s financial results substantially.

Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor-Based Systems Now Available

AMD announces enterprise customers now have more choices for rack-mount and blade systems based upon Quad-Core AMD OpteronT processors with the launch of six new innovative servers from Sun Microsystems. All systems are specifically designed to take advantage of the enhanced power management and virtualization capabilities offered with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and the overall system efficiency and scalability of AMD's Direct Connect Architecture.
"Sun uniquely delivers some of the most innovative and high performing server platforms available," said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. "We think our shared customers willexperience outstanding energy efficiency and a low total cost of ownership on server platforms designed to deliver all the benefits of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor technology."

"Our newest Sun Fire x64 servers provide a robust slate of options for customers demanding high performance, scalability and power efficiency," said Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, in conjunction with our unique server designs and the Solaris 10 OS, deliver extreme value, performance and reliability."
Sun has expanded its line of AMD Opteron processor-based servers with the new Sun FireT X4140, Sun Fire X4240 and the industry's only 4-socket x64 AMD Opteron processor-based server in a 2U form factor, the Sun Fire X4440. In addition, the Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers are now available with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. While the Sun BladeT X8440 and Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers are planned to be available by the end of June 2008. Through innovative features such as AMD CoolCoreT Technology and Rapid Virtualization Indexing, these new servers help deliver industry-leading energy-efficiency and virtualization performance that help customers optimize datacenter resources by reducing power, cooling, and space costs.