The European Commission has recently made public e-mail exchanges between Intel and various computer manufacturers that highlight anti-competitive deals Intel made to keep AMD processor products out of PCs over the past few years.

In particular, a Lenovo executive is quoted as writing in an internal e-mail in December of 2006:

Late last week Lenovo cut a lucrative deal with Intel. As a result of this, we will not be introducing AMD-based products in 2007 for our Notebook products.

Of course Lenovo wasn’t the only group influenced here, but of the other major PC manufacturers Lenovo is the only one to never offer AMD mobile processors (they did at one time offer a couple AMD desktop processors in some bottom-barrel systems).

Even HP, who has long been the relative champion of AMD mobile technology in several of its products, was found succumbing to the financial incentives offered by Chipzilla:

In an e-mail written in July 2002 during the negotiation of the rebate agreement between HP and Intel, an HP executive wrote: “PLEASE DO NOT… communicate to the regions, your team members or AMD that we are constrained to 5 percent AMD by pursuing the Intel agreement.”

Opinion
I encourage you to read the full article and others about the European Union’s anti-trust actions against Intel. And Intel’s actions certainly cross the anti-competitive line. We won’t debate economics here, but let me say this:

AMD’s mobile products haven’t been competitive in performance or power consumption in a while. And let’s not forget their nearly complete lack of marketing. They are severely disadvantaged in size and thus capitol compared to Intel, explaining a number of their deficits, but competitive products are needed to be competitive.

Source: [PCWorld]