Yet another AMD Vice President resigns

[nichomach]

Originally Posted by BUFF

...& yet from what I've read AMD/ATi has major design wins against nVidia with Apple & Dell albeit no doubt at a mainstream level?

If by "design wins" you mean new product ranges incorporating AMD parts, then yes; the problem is exactly how *ahem* "preferential" is the pricing having to be to get Apple and Dell in bed with AMD? It's no use saying "we shipped 50 million CPUs via Dell this year" if you're taking a financial hit on every one that you sell.

[shaithis]

Who would there be to complain about the monopoly though? and what would there be to complain about??

Intel cannot stop people making x86 compatible CPUs AFAIK

[Scott B]

Originally Posted by shaithis

Who would there be to complain about the monopoly though? and what would there be to complain about??

Intel cannot stop people making x86 compatible CPUs AFAIK

Obviously there is no real competitor left to complain when a monopoly occurs, but I don't think the anti-monopoly people would have to wait for a complaint - the mere existence of a monopoly should be enough.
It's been universally recognised since the time of Adam Smith and before that a private monopolies are bad things for the market and I could see Intel being asked to split up, just like Microsoft narrowly avoided. In principle there's no need to find specific cause for complaint, a monopoly is bad, full stop (unless it's state-run, in which case it's for the greater good of the people, y'right).
MS is still not out of the woods in Europe and the EU has already sent a statement of objections to Intel so I would be quite concerned if I were Intel.
In answer to your last point, the question is: would some random pissy little x86 CPU maker be considered legitamate competition, given Intel's ability to swat it at any time if it wanted?
Can you name any area of its business in which AMD holds the upper hand over Intel right now? Can you see that changing at all? Even when AMD was beating Intel in the consumer desktop market it was still turning over a fraction of Intel's and the consumer desktop segment is in steep decline right now anyway.
Still, maybe it will strike back with the launch of Barcelona next week...

[shaithis]

The reason Microsoft were jumped is entirely different IMO.

Hidden functions in the OS that only MS application designers knew about and embedding an application into the OS (IE) with no way to un-bundle it.

The only parallel I can see that could be argued (and acted on) would be making all Intel CPU socket designs available for every CPU manufacturer to use............and that does not help if the competitors CPUs end up slower........although having a standard socket that everyone uses (like it used to be back in the day!) would be nice for the consumer..........but it would tie the hands of non-Intel CPU makers.

[Scott B]

I mentioned MS to show how serious anti-trust action can be. The world won't tolerate a monopoly in processors and if AMD totally blows it you'll see that. But Intel won't let that happen. End of.

Your paragraph about socket standardisation summarises precisely the kind of undesirable environment created by a monopoly, so you obviously secretly agree with me ;-)

[RedStone]

I'm not too sure if things are looking quite that bad for AMD, but I barely pay any attention to consumer-use CPUs. On the server CPU front, AMD's still holding up, I guess.