Not out of the woods yet
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is still gathering information that could lead to antitrust action being taken against Intel, reports Business Week.
The scope of this investigation goes beyond the dispute between AMD and Intel, which was settled between the two last month when Intel handed over $1.25 billion and agreed to play nice from now on. Not only does the FTC reserve the right to make its own mind up about how Intel's activities have affected AMD, it wants to take a broader look at the fairness of its business practices.
Another focus for the FTC's investigation is Intel's claim, made at the start of this year, that the chipset licensing agreement it has with NVIDIA doesn't apply to Intel CPUs that have integrated memory controllers. As Intel CPUs are increasingly of this variety, NVIDIA was not happy at being denied the opportunity to develop chipsets for them, and promptly counter-sued.
The Business Week report claims FTC insiders have confirmed this NVIDIA focus as well as the fect that it continues to ask AMD for information. "The FTC is looking at how Intel uses various levers at its disposal to stop competition against it," said the un-named FTC source, although there is no official FTC statement on the matter.
Another NVIDIA complaint not mentioned in the piece concerns how Intel prices its popular Atom processor. Back in May, not long after Intel had been fined a billion euros for anti-competitive behaviour, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang moaned that the incentives Intel offers OEMs to buy both Atom and the associated Intel chipset are "unfair".
NVIDIA makes a chipset for Atom called Ion, and Huang's assertion was that the pricing structure prevented NVIDIA competing in the Atom chipset market. At the time, he said he hadn't decided whether to take legal action, but maybe the FTC will save him the hassle.
