[acdha]

The reason Intel gets more negativity here is that time and again they try to prevent fair competition. Itanium was an attempt to break AMD’s ability to sell x86, and each of the previous times AMD was providing better performance or pricing, Intel used their market position to require things like exclusivity or minimum volume commitments.

Given how well competition has worked for consumers, I do wonder if there’s some regulatory option here to reduce those back room deals. Given the way the world runs on microprocessors now there’s a decent argument that maintaining a robust market is like what we used to do to prevent one railroad or steel company from getting too much control.

[xbar]

You are right. Intel is terrible for competition. They had to be dragged, along with their SandyBridge, kicking and screaming into the future in order to keep up with AMD for the better part of a decade now.