Without an answering email from ATi stating, "Yea, good idea, Let's do it," I'm much less impressed with this email than this judge apparently is. It's also completely out of context, as in 2002 ATi was soundly ringing nVidia's bell in terms of price performance, which is precisely what I would imagine prompted nVidia to send this email (If the email was actually sent and this isn't something manufactured by plaintiff's lawyers for this lawsuit.)

Actually, I am very unimpressed with this email, myself, considering the context and considering that evidently the plaintiffs have nothing from ATi to corroborate that ATi ever did anything more offensive than read it. In 2002, ATi had no need to "agree" with nVidia on gpu pricing as ATi had far and away the better product line.

For some reason I don't care I want to but I don't. I don't feel ripped off, or betrayed, or hurt, or duped etc by either company. I don't see how this is abnormal business practice either. It funny but is seems to me the companies just want to make graphic cards and not worry about killing each others market share. I don't really see soft competition vs cutt throat competition as a bad thing. Maybe I pay more for a GPU but at least there are two companies making innovations in this field and to me tech ingenuity should be more cutt throat than market share bottom lines. This business arrangement seems good, much better than Intel approach to winning market shares.

AMD bought ATI. That ATI from 6 years ago doesn't exist anymore. Why the hell are they wrapped up in this? It just seems to be that in this particular case AMD should not have any liability. ATI has been enough punishment for them as it is as far as the TRUE cost is concerned. Let me add, I understand the law behind this situation. AMD purchased all of ATI's dirty bits too. The law, in this case, will probably finish ruining AMD unfortunately...

and you really think this is not common business practice? that rock you've been hiding under must be real deep in the mud. how do you think businesses like these reach the top? they f**k the un-savvy consumer royally, but they just call it opportunity. Just take a look at the ipod touch. its more than definite that its not worth half its price. cummon, a thousand dollar graphics cards barely comparing to consoles aren't even worth half the price. maybe my rant is overzealous but I'd like to believe there is truth to it.

From the outside view, things seem to be great - because of healthy profits, in one sense there has been more chance of researching and developing faster products, so while the court deems their practices as being bad, they may have actually benefitted the industry. I can only see this case ending in the consumers being punished as both companies will increase prices (or one of them, leading to the other to make increases to get extra profit) to cover the losses of any huge payout.

I wouldn't be suprised if it was nvidia that furnished the emails.

I would like to see a car company that introduces a model every 2 years thats twice as efficient/fast and innovative as their previous model, on the other hand car prices keep going up every refresh and we don't really get more gas efficient or powerful vehicles.

That is a very damaging e-mail indeed and this could ruin both AMD (yeah AMD is legally on the hook for ATI when they bought them) and Nvidia also.

I'll just assume everyone knows AMD isn't doing too well from the Q2 2008 results. Nvidia isn't doing that great either because Nvidia is now entering a free fall. They are currently worth only about half their 3 month high and a third of their 52-week high. Their partners and jumping off the sinking boat and their ASP must be hurting (cutting GTX 280 from $650 to $499?). Sure Nvidia is still over 2x the martket cap of AMD but neither company is in a good position to absorb the potential fall out. We'll just have to wait for Nvidia's quarterly results to know how bad they are doing.

I tried tried finding out more about the law suit and I don't think there is much in the argument supporting the price fixing conspiracy. In their own argument, they clearly showed the competition was unsustainable as both ATI and Nvidia was making near zero profits or even suffer continued losses!

"This is not a bad document for you. It is not a home run but it is a base hit."

That is exactly how I feel right now. :-)

EDIT: fixed typos and stuff

It would have been much better if ATI or Nvidia had a monopoly (like Intel). Then they could charge massive premiums on their chips and not fall afoul of the courts.

Seems that nVidia was soliciting. If ATi agreed then they are equally guilty. But do we know if ATi agreed?