New York State is doing what AMD wanted to do many years ago, but gave up… nail Intel with Antitrust proceedings.

I remember in the mid-90’s when AMD was just about to spring the Athlon chip that nudged them ahead of Intel in performance for the first time in, well, ever. For years before this, AMD would publicly decry Intel’s business tactics… trying to shove them out of the market. Exclusive deals with Microsoft, shady dealings with review sites and benchmark tools, and weird clock performance ratings. AMD shouted about these things early and often. But nothing ever came of it. Either their legal team was inept, or Intel’s was just that good. After many years of this, AMD seemed to give up. I haven’t read a peep of anti-Intel whining out of them in years.

Now, out of the blue New York wants to do the dirty work. This was prompted by similar suits/investigations by the European Union and other countries. (I believe Microsoft is getting a bunch of similar scrutiny and attention).

This couldn’t come at a better time for AMD, as they were trounced by the great performance leap of the Intel Core2 proc, and are now struggling to show they can compete. Even I, as a long time buyer of AMD, had to switch… after over a decade of using AMD chips in my gaming rigs. I mean, the Core2’s are so fast and so cheap, and left me with a great upgrade path.

AMD also is feigning ignorance in the matter, and was subpoenaed themselves in the case.

This is going to get interesting.

A trump move. While I haven’t personally purchased an ATI product in over a decade, I do use AMD processors in most of my built systems… for over a decade. ATI has made great strides in the past 5+ years and their cards are arguably neck and neck with NVIDIA’s products.

The merger excites the gamer in me, as the possibilities of CPU-GPU sharing, cooperation, and even on-chip die-level integration can come from this. AMD already produces it’s own chipsets and motherboards, so we could easily see an entire integrated motherboard fully manufactured by AMD.

Intel’s answer? Pulling licensing for ATI to make Intel chipsets. No real shocker there.