how is having to give amd a billion and a 400 million fine not punishment ?
You do realize that Intel has made 70 billion+ and up to 79 billion per year since 2018 and averaged 55 billion between 2010 and 2017 right?
You do realize that Intel paid Dell 4.3 BILLION in rebates right?
You think Intel was "punished" by a measly 1.4 billion? That's not even a drop in the bucket for them. They earned $79 billion in 2020 alone. Punishment is designed to correct behavior but that's not what a fine this size does. A fine this size encourages anti-competitive behavior because companies know that at best they will get fined a tiny fraction of what they gained.
AMD could not offer the same volume intel did
In a magic world where cpu's just pop in to existence it wouldn't have mattered, but this isn't a magic world.
AMD couldn't make enough cpu's as it's a smaller player which is why they went in to debt to make fabs so they could offer higher volumes making them more interesting for large players like dell.
And all of this is just an assumption based on nothing. Given that we know for a fact that Dell was paid by Intel 3.4 billion to not use AMD, I very much doubt AMD was going into debt to serve a company that wouldn't buy their products to begin with.
It also doesn't really check out either, it's not like Dell can't use a specific processor vendor in an lower volume SKU or in a smaller total number of SKUs. In addition, we know AMD provided the chips for various consoles throughout the years, consoles of which are high volume products. A single console is going to sell vastly more than any single Dell SKU. Clearly they were able to secure wafer contracts that enabled them to scale up volume. Heck to this day Dell essentially had to be strong armed into offering AMD server products by it's customers and even then their customer support constantly tries to sell you Intel only products.
intel also has and had a slew of other products that made creating systems for system integrators far easier
on the server side there is the validation that needs to happen, just switching to AMD because they are a couple percent faster on the fly doesn't happen it takes years to do that.
which is why it took until zen 3 that intel started to see a serious bite in their market share.
AMD had 2 decent generations back then
intel having a marketing department, ... I can sit here all evening writing reasons why intel was doing better than AMD
There is a reason why it was hard for the judge to estimate how much damage Intel caused by it's rebates and less kosher schemes that might have put them in an unfair advantage against their competition.
Nothing but a buch of gishgallop designed to push the conversation off topic and ignore the fact that we know Intel paid Dell 4.3 Billion to not buy AMD. Regardless of whether your arguments above are correct (and many of them are questionable at best), you are ignoring the facts in favor of your unsupported opinion.
If Intel had the above then why did they pay Dell 3.4 billion to not buy AMD? Why did they have a customer sales program for stores that encouraged sales people to push Intel processors over AMD via incentives for those sales people?
Oh yeah Intel had a marketing deparment, a very unethical and anti-competitive one.
IMHO AMD would have gone down even if intel had played 'fair'
I don't put much stock in this opinion given what I've read thus far. Again though, it's really irrelevant to the topic and seems to only act as justification for Intel's illegal behavior. "Oh AMD would have failed anyways", clearly Intel didn't believe that because they would not have engaged in the practices they did if that had been their line of thinking. Intel saw AMD as threat and not just a company that would have failed on it's own.
And FYI I'm writing this on a system with a 7950x, I owned a K6 and K7 when those were the systems that were the best buy.
I'm not writing this out of some sort of fanatic fanboiism.
This is the "I'm can't be racist because I know a black guy" argument. Your PC specs aren't even filled. Of course this is the internet so you can claim whatever you want but you don't seem to realize that owning a product does not suddenly mean you can't be biased against it. Claiming you own an AMD processor is not the get out of jail free card you seem to think it is.
Yes, progress slowed down a little bit, but as I wrote in my previous post the GFC also happened in that period.
Money dried up for 4 years so it's not just AMD's disapearance that caused this.
We would have had 450mm wafers if that hadn't, double the surface area per wafer over current 300mm wafers...
A little? We were getting 3-5% a generation to the point where an entirely new ecosystem of processors outside of x86 was born and was able to catch up.
People were buying Intel's excuse that TIM was superior (whether that be Intel's claim that it lasted longer or that solder caused die cracking in customer's systems, both complete BS) and that there just wasn't much more performance to be had until AMD rolled back in with Zen. Then all of a sudden it's back to solder (because it's vastly better) and performance gains per generation returned to normal.
It's truly amazing to me how people continue to gaslight themselves as to how bad things were in the CPU market.