The payout is the cash part of the settlement. There's going to be verbiage not disclosed to us as part of that- if Intel's paying $1.5B, that's quite a bit of cash and translates into some clauses that they have to have probably agreed to that would allow AMD to drag them right back into court over if they don't quit doing many of the things they were doing.
Wow! I'm very impressed with this news. I knew that AMD and Intel have been bickering in the past. 1.5Billion, sounds like a lot. Not sure if AMD lost a lot more out of it though. I'd like to know if AMD are just biting the bullet to keep peace. Maybe it's costing them too much in court? Or maybe the next product line will include some new shared technology..? Probably realised at the end of it all, that they're both just making the lawyers rich, and the ping pong sessions in court never end.
I am not really sure if AMD deserves that much money, because if they would have been in a similar market position they would have probably done the same. At least they get some extra money to buy wafers to produce some ATI HD series 5 chipsThey could have sold much more chips if they would have been available - not really clever...
Well, at least this is not AMDs fault! They even tried to avoid this problem with producing the 4770 in 40nm. The 4770 was a testrun (which failed) but TSMC was able to fail after 6(!!!) months of experience, too.
I read, that they even managed to lower the yield rate. Of course TSMC denied two days ago and now says, they kept the yield rate hope to get better yields beginning of 2010(!!!!)! Perhaps someone should tell them, that 2009 has a christmas, too!
Sometimes you lose, sometimes others win! And if you don't have luck, you get bad luck additionally!
Well, I think it would have been hell on earth for Nvidia fan boys, if AMD had a very good yield with R800. So at least some people are happy...
$1.25B not $1.5B. The Associated Press has a more informative write up: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/200911...amd_settlement
You didn't get it right. AMD is in a deep sh*t right now, and Intel just helps its only competitor to stay afloat.
If AMD dies, Intel will stop to exist as a whole corporation - it'll be torn apart by antimonopoly agencies.
Thats not it at all.
Intel *has been* and *still is* on the hook for illegal business practices.
What has happened is this;
AMD convinced Intel to GIVE UP THEIR DEFENCE. AMD now has a pile of cash out of it and an AGREEMENT from Intel that they *won't do that any more*.
Which means no more paying off specific major system vendors to keep them from buying AMD parts.
Fact is that AMD has *always* been much smaller than Intel. This is nothing new. But what happens when your competitor, who HAS a near-monopoly, makes under the table deals/threats to MOST of your potential market specifically to the purpose of ensuring that they will NEVER be your customer? Because that is what was happening.
Its the same kind of BS that MS pulls with hardware vendors... if you only sell hardware with *our* OS, then we'll give you a $50 discount -- if you don't agree to this, then we won't license you to distribute our crappy OS *at all*.