Intel cash pays down AMD debt
Less than a week after accepting $1.25bn from Intel in exchange for dropping its legal actions against Chipzilla, AMD has announced how it plans to use that windfall. In a trio of Wednesday announcements, the world's second-largest microprocessor designer revealed a plan to slash its debt by as much as $1.4 billion, thus …
AT&T was broken up by local and long distance service as well as by service areas. Intel's dominance is in the manufacturing of Intel MicroProcessors. Were you thinking that Intel should only be allowed to sell microprocessors in certain geographical areas while AMD would have other protected geographic areas?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Intel deals in more than just microprocessors.
For one, they have their own chip sets, their own video cards, they also have their own flash memory division, and also build ARM derivatives (Xscale processors). There is plenty there to break up if they are found to be anti-competitive.
No, you'd remove Intel's vertical integration --- so it would break into a processor core IP company like ARM, into a flash memory company, into a fab company, and so on.
Close to the same way that AT&T was split up --- into a number of retailers, a long-haul company, a product development company and so on. Consumers only noticed the increase in the number of companies offering retail telephony, but the changes went a lot deeper than that and were aimed at destroying AT&T's vertical integration as much as allowing retail competition.
The article specifically states "..that could result in the world's largest processor maker being broken into pieces much as AT&T was.." which could mean any type of split. If a split were to occur, I'd imagine their microprocessor business would be separated from their motherboard, or perhaps domestic and business-grade processors could be separated.
So in a way it is exactly like AT&T. It may get split into different departments, for different target markets.
On the other hand, AMD's existence is likely to encourage Intel into criminally abusing it's monopoly like position. There is nothing illegal itself about Intel having a monopoly.
Err, all those products you listed are microprocessors of some type.
The old AT&T provided good service, reliable phones and pay phones in areas where people did not have enough access to personal phones. Now after all of the breakups and recombining I can only get DSL from AT&T. Their service sucks and there aren't any pay phone for the poor now. My only other choice is to buy cable from one available company that gives me sixty channels I don't want and goes up every year.
Intel is about the only shining example of American Industry left. Breaking it up would be really stupid.
All those products certainly aren't microprocessors. They are all electronic goods, PC related if thats what you mean, but flash memory is far from being microprocessors.
> there aren't any pay phone for the poor now
You mean the drug dealers... who would use the phones to avoid apprehension by the law.
It is cheaper for the poor to use a pay-as-you-go cell phone than it ever was to use a pay phone!
Mr. Hud Dunlap,
Please, get back on your medication, and if you dont take medication, please start... Intel is a shining example of an insecure and abusive criminal enterprise. breaking them up would be the best thing that could happen to the IT industry...
AMD is such a shining example of a company that stole near bankruptcy from the jaws of market relevance with the excellent due dilligence ole Hector did massively overpaying for ATI. Sad enough he screwed the consumers by taking out one legitimate competitor in the cpu space but he also did a good job hosing another in the gpu space. I wonder how long Intel and European/American governments will keep this constant money losing enterprise afloat. I also wonder how much of a pension Intel is giving Hector for helping its margins with his excellent tenure . This assclown deserves jail time not only for being an incompetent manager but all the insider dealing he was doing as well.
Intel's recent payouts - over $3billion in fines/compensation, $2billion of which went to AMD (alright, I'm rounding), is 25ish% of their cash pile. And Intel didn't have to lose it. They brought it on themselves with some sharp marketing practises, and that's their fault. No wonder there's some unhappy share holders.
Sure, AMD and Intel do compete, and some would argue that AMD are architecturally superior. But the real competition is increasingly looking like it will come from ARM and friends. (@Ogi - Intel sold Xscale to Marvel, and that's looking like a real mistake now).
There's 2GHz ARMs that consume 0.25W out there right now. It's a level of power consumption that neither AMD or Intel get anywhere near. It's likely plenty enough compute power for anyone's normal day to day needs. This offers the prospect of smallish hand carried devices that do everything you need as quickly as any x86 device can do it, but runs for ages on a small battery. Now who wouldn't want one of those?
Certainly much more attractive than carrying round Atom based netboooks which, so far as I can tell, are generally just like crap old laptops from the bad old days but don't have much battery life advantage over a standard laptop.
I don't think Intel can sensibly rejoin the ARM club without looking very silly. AMD could join in, but there's already plenty of fabs out there churning out some very impressive parts, so AMD would really struggle to differentiate themselves from the rest of the herd.
Didn't Intel sell its ARM stuff to Marvell a while back?
"and offer up to $500m in new senior notes to help finance the debt-reduction scheme"
When individuals take out a loan to pay off another one it's stupid. When corporations do it it's sound business practice...
If the interest rate on the new debt is lower than that on the old (which ought to be the case in the current economic climate), then it *is* sound practice (this holds true in the consumer space too).
What is stupid is replacing one debt with another more expensive one (which is what the likes of Ocean Finance usually do to consumers).
