Quite Frankly why anyone would enter a market that has 4Bil+ setup costs never mind the 20 Years + experinece AMD has is beyond me.

The final nail in the coffin would be the fact AMD has cross licenseing agreements with Intel for IP such as X86 and SSE n.

A new entrant to the market would never be allowed by Intel to gain access to such IP .

NOT GOING to happen -end of discussion.

On the other hand, if somebody takes over after AMD or buys out their remains, often IP-contracts for products in use get thrown in or are at least renegoiated. And there are powers that has the ability to do things like it, but it would probably take a coalition. There are actually quite a few experienced players out there, although they have stayed out of the marker for good reason.

Hell, even Apple went over to Intel because they demanded too much from IBM, but IBM has both the expertise and experience for selling good chips, and they have collaborated with AMD on features. Then you have also have SUN and Motorola on their corners.

As for manufacturers, most of the manufacturing are outsourced to a third-party. Look at graphics, flash and memory chips for instance, there you have UMC, TSMC, SMI, Chartered, Samsung, Fujitsu, Nec... etc.

Even if you don't personally care if AMD is around or not, you need to thank AMD for ending the 1000$ mainstream CPU market. Before the K6 lines, Intel was complacent and slow to update products, and charging absurd amounts. After the K6, Intel needed to compete with these cheap new chips, and the Celerons were born and reborn. This also started the slow spiral downward of CPU pricing.

Everyone owes AMD a thank you for that, if nothing else.

Also, this lawsuit is about the early K7 days, plus some before and after. Maybe you don't remember, but it was hard as heck to find a mobo for your new K7. The Asus K7M, probably the very best first gen mobo, was sold only in unbranded white boxes. Asus couldn't officially acknowledge that they had made the mobo or Intel would pull their chipset shipments. More recently, Supermicro, a long-time Intel 'partner' (in the jailhouse sense) started making Opteron motherboards. For the first few months, they would not use the Supermicro name anywhere near the boards, for fear of Intel backlash.

This lawsuit is far from groundless, and it helps you even if you're a hardcore Intel fan.

It's about time. With Microsoft vs Netscape no one moved to act until Microsoft had already killed the opponent. It's to bad it's taken the world this long, and it's too bad that this is likely going to be a very drawn-out legal battle. I hope AMD gets some substantial payments from Intel. And I hope
Barcelona can compete with Penryn.

I like the comment "the market is functioning normally" . . . . which is the present . . . after Intel stopped strong-arming clients. This whole fiasco is about what had taken place.

I love this stuff . . . . .and althought he Core2 is a beautiful processor, Intel is going to have to pony up some cash.

Remember cheap dual celerons?

Remember Intel disabling that feature in future celerons so duallies were really, really expensive???

And it was for no other reason than greed?

I hope they get a 10 billion$ fine.

As usual, on the release of the news, Intel's stock will go up. LOL.

Back in the day the only way to get an AMD built machine, was if it was a no name rig. This explains why brand name machines only had Intel chips. But paying a fixed sum to a company to be solo supplier of cpus is not competition.

As Peter Griffon would say: UH OH!

So what Intel is saying is not that they deny the accusations, but that it isn't breaking the law?

Now, not that AMD is an angel, but this is precisely why I like rooting for the underdogs.

If I had a Core2Duo sitting on my desk running Vista Ultimate-Cash-Grab version, I would just feel dirty. Even though it would probably kick my rig's butt six ways from Sunday..