>>
|
No. 57791
ID: 53e7c0
Right. And I don't think people understand the type of market pull Intel has here. Since Intel got caught pulling their shit with OEM partners, Compaq (now HP), Dell, Gateway, Best Buy, Circuit City(now dead) all had to file for bankruptcy restructuring.
That's the amount of money Intel was handling under the table to these guys, minus legal fees and fines of course from Uncle Sam of course.
AMD had to end up settling out of court for a fraction of what it actually cost, because Intel just kept filing counter-suit after counter-suit, filing delay after delay (called a stay of court), using their position and money to use the legal system to literally bludgeon AMD into settling.
It's the same reason why AMD's and ARM's mobile and laptop CPUs are eating Intel's lunch, but AMD powered laptops still generally suck. Nobody bothered to carry AMD processors because Intel was paying everyone not to. Now, years later, that's all been found out but still no one is making top of the line motherboards and etc. for AMD powered laptops.
Intel does very little of their own shit anymore, and they feel if they throw enough money at it, regardless, it will be fine (Ultrabooks).
Looking specifically at Ultrabooks for instance, because this at the time was their "halo device" that became a total market failure:
They made a notebook to compete with MacBook Air, made it really thin, removed most of what makes a PC useful, then charge a massive premium for it.
Intel however dumped more money in to the line, derided the critics, and "fixed everything". Sandy Bridge Ultrabooks didn’t sell, so officially the message was that they weren’t actually meant to sell until Ivy Bridge came along. Those would be less expensive and have better battery life.
Incrementally speaking, they were both, but they still didn’t sell, nor did slightly better battery life compared to a real notebook. The fact that any Ultrabook which wasn’t immediately and obviously terrible was painfully expensive and borderline non-functional seemed lost on Intel.
During the reign of Ivy Bridge, the market was flooded with removable screens, 180 degree hinges, twist tablets, and detachable everything. SemiAccurate had a surreal moment at CES when an Intel employee pointed to the wall of Ultrabooks on their keynote stage and said, “That is innovation”. They were pointing out three different hinge types in two colors, silver and black.
Before long the screed changed to, “Wait for Haswell based Ultrabooks, those are the real ones”.
As of 2013, independent coders and software engineers were reporting that they were still working with compilers that used the "cripple AMD" function (the case was settled in 2009) despite a "non-defective" compiler being a part of the FTC anti-trust suit. For example, I myself, have an AMD cpu, and in games like Starcraft 2, I've noticed a noticeable boost running a VM and spoofing an Intel cpu at the same speeds as my Bulldozer.
|