Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Wakey, wakey. Intel has a full patent license with Rambus that was acquired long ago. Intel paid a lump sum to acquire the license and settle a patent suit by Rambus.
The settlement License superseded an earlier R-DRAM license that Intel had with Rambus
The ITC is not an Article III Court so the Rambus decision will not have a binding effect aka res judicata in the District Court action against nVidia. However, the ITC result is a strong indicator that things will not go well in the patent infringement action. But at least they will get a fair trial before the hanging :)
The FTC allegations are about to disappear in a rising cloud of smoke. The Intel Settlement will include a bunch of provisions where Intel agrees to refrain from doing what Intel says it never did.
The settlement will also include volume discount rules approved by the FTC that Intel can use -- 100% FTC Certified Legal Rules. All the volume discount earning sales of processors by Intel under those rules -- 100% US Government Certified Legal sales -- will by necessity exclude AMD from making those unit sales.
How do you like them apples? My bet is that it really twists your panties.
The FTC does not levy fines and rarely asks for funds to remediate the marketplace. It is highly unlikely that the Settlement will include any payments by Intel.
The Settlement will have a lot of stuff that fits in the "Intel agrees to not do what it says it never did" category. I think that there will also be a set of rules on volume discounts. The effect of the volume rules will provide a safe harbor for Intel to use discount practices it can live with. If Intel has FTC approved set of Discount Rules, it will cheerfully follow those Rules and beat AMD to a bloody pulp.
When is Bulldozer supposed to arrive? When is 32nm production supposed to get fixed?
Any antitrust complaint in the US would be doomed because Intel was following FTC Rules -- US Government certified Legal Rules.
And Hector may have gotten off doing a bit more with a gorgeous blonde who likes to party.
Not that I ever held doubts, but Tecate sure nailed the relationship between Danielle and Hector. I wonder if Hector also played his guitar to impress Danielle ?
Sex, Lies and Insider Trading at IBM costarring Hector Ruiz.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/06/news/companies/ibm_insider_trading.fortune/index.htm
The $$ per job metric is of course total nonsense. When you spend money to build infrastructure you get for example an improved road, a repaired bridge or a new water main plus jobs for the people that are employed. Even a functional idiot knows that valuing the new and improved infrastructure at zero is total nonsense.
The same analysis applies when the payments are directed for employing teachers, fire fighters and police where the expenditure produces services.
The deficit you are citing was the "budget deficit" which was much less than the actual deficit increase is revealed by an increase of the federal debt of about $5.5T over 8 years. The smaller "budget deficit" was achieved through accounting tricks and lots of off budget spending. The spending for the two wars was always placed in a supplemental spending bill and did not count as part of the "budget" but the war spending certainly did count in the overall deficit.
You need to actually read Krugman if you are going to give a summary of his positions. A Fox News summary just does not work.
The short version of Krugman's advice is: spend now and save later. Spending no to stimulate the economy will do a great deal to reduce the deficit as the recovery takes place. After the economy has recovered then efforts can focus on reducing the deficit.
Here is a great chart that shows the factors contributing to the deficit in future years:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036
The SEC thinks that Dell does its own accounting and will fine Dell for its misbehavior.
What makes you think that Intel provides accounting services to Dell? Is it your idiocy or ignorance?
Window to Dell's Decline
Note to FPG: it wasn't anything Intel did. Among other things, it was buying junk components and hiding the problems from customers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/technology/29dell.html
Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.
....
For the last seven years, the company has been plagued by serious problems, including misreading the desires of its customers, poor customer service, suspect product quality and improper accounting.
Dell has tried to put those problems behind it. In 2005, it announced it was taking a $300 million charge related, in part, to fixing and replacing the troubled computers. Dell set aside $100 million this month to handle a potential settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over a five-year-old investigation into its books, which will most likely result in federal accusations of fraud and misconduct against the company’s founder, Michael S. Dell.
The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade, causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break.
According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.
Intel sent a Notice to shareholders of a Proposed Settlement of Shareholders Derivative Actions. Some of the changes for Intel business practices listed in the Notice may well end up in the FTC consent decree.
The changes mainly go to establishing a Compliance Procedure and Organization in the legal department along with mandatory antitrust training for relevant employees
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/INTC/945756462x0x379898/39114ae6-6da3-4261-ac0f-d47a85a61aec/Settlement_Notice_June2010.pdf
One legged stools have a very good purpose as you would know if you had grown up on a farm.
http://www.howcast.com/videos/224196-How-To-Milk-a-Cow
That sounds pretty dead to me. Yes, there is a qualification of "never say never" but it looks like Intel will focus on a coprocessor for HPC. A coprocessor designed specifically for HPC would likely perform better than a converted GPU but it would not work well in a good discreet Graphics solution.
What AMD really needs to do is tout the advantage of its "Green" Paint. Attractive color blends well in your home decor and reduces environmental pollution. No organic solvents are used in applying the paint!!
Oops, I earned the Bart Simpson award for that mistake.
I can't imagine an Intel board action that would need a tie breaker vote. The Supreme Court may do 5-4 decisions but the boards of big corporations don't work with one vote margins.
I read this differently. If you parse the phrase carefully, "when" means "if and when".
If Sean Maloney was certainly coming back I think that he would have remained on the board. Even if his health recovers, Maloney may very well have an awakened sense of mortality and come to the conclusion that is is time to slow down and smell the roses.
I think that you have the acronyms right. The Nexgen design team was located in California and there was another AMD design team in Texas.
You need to get vaccinated against the Appledolphilus virus. That and some sparkles should tide you over until you mature a bit.
RE: an Atom N500-based netbook in the third quarter with a price set at about NT$18,000 (US$575)
A dual core Atom-based netbook will cost less than an iPad and will do anything about 2 or 4 times as well as an iPad can except make Stave Jobs smile. It will also probably decode and run HD movies which is something the iPad can't even think about doing... And the dual cor Atom will have a real keyboard.
Could someone tell why anyone would want to buy an iPad instead of a dual core Atom powered netbook?
Stacy Smith is a guy... but I had to look it up the first time I wondered about the question.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/s_smith.htm
Yes, Intel's apparent strategy of win it on appeal suggests that a settlement is very unlikely. The FTC and Intel are so far apart that a settlement is not currently possible unlikely. But things may change sometime in the future. Never say never as the saying goes.
It seems that Intel's current strategy is to fight hard in the FTC and then win the case on appeal. The Courts are not a friendly place for the antitrust theories being used against Intel. And the courts definitely are very unfriendly to FTC's position the Section 5 can reach unfair competition beyond the reach of the antitrust law.
If the analysis of Intel's strategy is correct, The strategy pretty much assumes that Intel will not do well at the FTC level and I would defer to their thinking in that issue.
Intel filed a lawsuit before Nvidia offered a QPI chipset in order to obtain a declaration on the scope of the license. This opened the door for Nvidia to make claims against Intel that otherwise would have remained in the negotiations.
Note that Nvidia later decided not to produce a QPI chipset. Instead, it focused on discrete GPUs and the Ion platform. At that point Intel was left fighting a lawsuit that never needed to be filed.
The lesson is don't go start a legal fight before it is necessary. I don't know the status of the negotiations but whatever was happening, Nvidia did not have a product on the market so the question of patent infringement was entirely theoretical. It may be fun to strut your macho but it sure isn't smart.
The law suit over the scope of the Nvidia License Agreement was initiated by Intel when it sought a declaration that the license did not cover the new QPI bus. I think the lawsuit was a strategic error by Intel because it allowed Nvidia to attack the entire structure of the license.
One result of the Nvidia dispute was that the FTC decided to include the Nvidia competition issues in its Complaint. After the Intel and AMD settlement a good case could be made that the antitrust issues raised by AMD were all in the past and were no longer an issue. I think that a Consent Decree between Intel that would define legitimate discount practices was quite possible.
Apparently, the Nvidia competition issues gave the FTC incentive to charge ahead with a very aggressive enforcement action to establish an aggressive regulation posture like the EU Commission and file a Complaint against Intel. At the very least, the most contentious issues in the FTC Complaint involve the Nvidia competition issues and those issues would not exist if Intel had not initiated the Nvidia law suit.
What amazing eyesight! This AMDolt can look at wafers with his naked eyes and determine that the wafers are Defect Free.
When you install an SSD do you have to reinstall all the software or is there a practical way to do a disk copy onto the SSD?
The DOJ and the FTC are truly independent and do indeed sometimes have different views of the antitrust law. The Microsoft enforcement action presents an example of this conflict.
The FTC investigated Microsoft and in a 3 to 2 decision decided not to institute a Complaint. However, the DOJ opened another investigation of Microsoft that resulted in a Complaint in District Court and an eventual finding of antitrust violations by MS.
The FTC and DOJ both have jurisdiction over the antitrust laws and share enforcement responsibilities. By informal agreement, the two agencies agree on industry areas for the focus of their enforcement activity. But as the Microsoft case shows, if one agency does not take action the other agency can still proceed with an enforcement action when it disagrees strongly enough.
The FTC action against Intel is not an antitrust action under Sherman 2 but is instead an action under Section 5 of the FTC Act which is directed to regulating "fair" competition. Tom Rousch pointed out in his dissenting opinion that the FTC act has a broader reach than Sherman 2 and could regulate conduct that is beyond the reach of Sherman 2. In theory, this is true but the courts have not really approved this concept for competition cases and will probably hesitate to move beyond the established antitrust standards of conduct
Christine Varney has taken no action whatsoever against Intel. She is part of the DoJ and the FTC is an independent agency that is independent of the the DoJ.
Andy Glew is a legend in his own mind. It also seems that he has trouble keeping a job.
Toshiba has a laptop with a touch screen that rotates and then folds down over the keyboard to form a tablet. I played with one of these on a Frys visit a couple weeks ago and thought it was a very innovative design. However, it is a bit pricey compared to the iMaxiPad.
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/ebtext.to?page=tabletpcfam&seg=HHO
And before the spin off of Spansion there was the AMD spin off of Legerity.
http://austin.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2000/08/14/daily22.html
Legerity went broke and the left over pieces were acquired by Zarlink Semiconductor, a Canadian company, in 2007.
http://www.zarlink.com/zarlink/hs/press_releases_6978.htm
The pieces operate as a subsidiary in a small office in Austin.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=130858
The Radeon HD 5830 validation issue is clearly due to a failure of the Intel interface design used to connect with discrete GPUs. Intel designed the interface without including a feature to accommodate future AMD/ATI design faults. The FTC should promptly amend its Complaint to include this issue and produce fair competition for the benefit of the technically challenged.
</snark>
Why would anyone want a $500 pad -- keyboard extra --when they can get a well equipped 15.4" laptop with an I3 processor and 4GB of DDR3 for $600? Note: Keyboard included
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0326336
I have been paying attention to Intel for quite a long time and think I understand what is important for Intel quite well. Your wingnut theories and those of Sowell have little or nothing to do with Intel and everything to do with your radical political views.
Take your propaganda to the Free Republic where your fellow Freepers will be happy to sheer you on.