AMD revives antitrust allegations against Intel
A new brief filed in AMD's antitrust complaint against its rival is said to lay out specific evidence of Intel's wrongdoing, but any pertinent details are redacted in the public version.
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday resurrected its old allegations against Intel, although it kept the salacious details under a thick layer of black ink.
AMD filed a heavily redacted brief as part of its ongoing antitrust case against Intel, saying it has new, specific evidence of Intel's misconduct but blacking out almost all of the evidence in the brief. AMD filed suit in 2005, claiming that Intel has used intimidation and predatory pricing to coerce PC and server vendors into excluding AMD's chips from their products. Intel denies all charges.
In its initial complaint, AMD claimed to have evidence of Intel's wrongdoing but has never shared specific allegations against individuals, or explained exactly how Intel's tactics were deployed. Now, it claims to have at least shared them with the court, although because specific individuals are named the redactions are apparently necessarily. The document is pretty much unreadable; I liked The Register's take on it.
Despite AMD's claims that it cites "chapter and verse" in the brief, as AMD's chief lawyer told The Wall Street Journal, the footnotes of the brief appear to be signals of who AMD needs to depose to prove its allegations. For example, following the first section in which AMD apparently lays out specific (if redacted) complaints involving Intel's dealings with Dell, the company's lawyers write: "Plaintiffs will likely need to depose witnesses from various levels of the Intel and Dell organizations to establish that (interesting, juicy part redacted)."
This case remains in the discovery phase, and any trial appears very far off.