AMD Antitrust Blogging Roundtable Report

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

This morning RealTechNews was invited to sit in on a roundtable discussion with Tom McCoy, AMD Executive Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Administrative Officer. The discussion was regarding the antitrust action by AMD against Intel.

This wil be a rather disjointed post, I think, as I was taking notes ‘on the fly’ …

They indicated they might do this again in the future; however, in the WebEx app I noticed … only me!

Interesting opening comment by Mr. McCoy. He called it a ‘war’ vs Intel.

One point he then made was that there was a fair amount of frustration in terms of communication with the media. For one thing, as a senior executive, he cannot see the evidence being gathered in terms of the discovery portion of the lawsuit. He also cannot communicate anything to us (the media) even if he wanted to (of course!)

He then moved on the a slide that details the market share of the various companies, and naturally discussed how the market is most likely never going to have another major competitor. Then some legal-speak over how it’s necessary for competition for there to be alternatives to Intel.

According to him, fear of retaliation from Intel is what really affects product allocation, based on the monopoly Intel has. What AMD has to do, and he emphasized that he feels the suit is for the industry and not just AMD, is to have the opportunity to compete “on merit” in the industry space.

He felt the investigations will continue and especially the loss of evidence (remember the missing emails?) will be looked at carefully.

He also noted that even when AMD has tried to “give processors away”, customers have replied that they can’t even take them because of the penalties that would be inflicted on them.

Intel’s defense that AMD does not have enough capacity to handle increased market share is ludicrous, McCoy indicated, because AMD has always shown the capability to increase capacity when needed.

… and If you look closely at recent statements by Intel, they made it clear that there monopoly business model depends on keeping at least an 80% market share.

Question by Scott Carroll (AMD): What will Intel use as a defense? Their primary arguments will be and are that there is nothing wrong with the market and that the problem is with AMD, not Intel.

Question: AMD’s win in Japan and its effect on AMD. The Japanese are beginning to test the waters. However, despite Toshiba’s use of AMD chips in laptops, it’s clear that in the mobile market Intel has a very good platform. However, if Intel is constrained away from their egregious tactics, AMD will be able to make inroads.

Question: has the discovery process found any specific instances of retalation against companies. Naturally, as he indicated above, McCoy could not answer this, but he CAN say that based on 12 years of conversations with industry participants, this is definitely a fear in the industry.

Question: much of the complaint revolves around bulk discounts, etc. How does the enthusiast market affect AMD. Naturally, I already knew the answer to this … I mean, for some time AMD was ahead in the race and the enthusiast market went for AMD CPUs. Now it’s reverse, with Intel’s latest chips in the lead. But competition leads to leapfrogging tech (although it’s been a while since the last AMD leap over Intel).

We Say: Whew, that was about it. I’m not sure how many bloggers besides myself were there … at least two. I hope there was enough attendance to warrant this again, as I certainly found it interesting.