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Intel sues Insurer

Matt Thomas — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:15:30 +0000

Another day, another story about somebody suing somebody else in the technology sector. This time it’s the turn of Intel to flex their legal muscle as they take on pithily titled insurance provider, American Guarantee and liability insurance.

The suit centre’s around the alleged breach of a contract between the two companies. It seems the insurance company failed to pay Intel’s legal costs when they were sued by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for alleged unfair business practices and anti-competitive conduct concerning the sale and advertisement of its chips.

Intel took out insurance policies with two other companies (Old Republic and XL insurance) to cover legal fees in the event of a suit against them. Once they had exhausted those, to the tune of $66 million (most of which was payed by XL), American Guarantee apparently refused to pay up a dollar of the $50 million policy that Intel took out with them.

Intel put it like this in their complaint, apologies for the legalese…

“Despite the clear potential of covered liability presented by the AMD litigation, AGLI summarily denied coverage leaving Intel to defend itself in the AMD litigation without the benefits owned under the AGLI Policy.”

American Guarantee have so far declined to comment.

New Low Power Chip from AMD

James Oliver — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:09:04 +0000

Chip maker, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) plans to add a new processor to its line this year. Nothing particularly newsworthy there, I know, except that the new chip will be ultra low-power. The reason that’s useful is that it minimises problems with heating and cooling, so that the chip can be installed in large servers that get a lot of use. However, so far, the company is declining to say just how much power usage they have managed to cut with their new Opteron processor.

The development this particular chip was no doubt inspired by the announcement that Microsoft would be using Opteron processors for their Windows Azure service – a large cloud computing initiative.

AMD apparently believes in cloud computing, and is betting on the idea that low power chips will become more and more popular in the near future due to the rise of the massive data centres, being built by Google, Microsoft, et al., which will facilitate it.

That is not their opinion alone. Last year Intel released its 50-watt Xeon chip, with a similar view to minimising heating and cooling issues in large installations. It would appear that a new battlefront has opened up it the chip making war.

Intel slashes Prices

James Oliver — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:48:36 +0000

It seems that no one is immune to the recession, even the giants of hardware manufacture. Intel, the biggest Chip maker in the world has cut its prices and when I say cut, I mean cut. The cost cutting bonanza at Intel has seen some of their products’ prices drop by as much as 48 percent!

The cuts have been put down, obviously, to slumping demand during the recession as people across the world decide they don’t actually need that new computer, but also to increased competition from Advanced Micro Devices. For a while now, AMD have been cutting into Intel’s market share with lower cost chips. This move is seen as a good way to pull the rug out from under them.

The Intel Celeron processor, designed specifically to work with laptops has seen the biggest cut, dropping 48 percent to a new price of $70 dollars. In addition, some Quad Core models – that’s the one with four processors in one product – have been slashed by 40 percent to a price of $316 dollars. Intel have however, kept the prices of their three most expensive chips absolutely unchanged.

Intel are optimistic that these changes will do the trick, expecting sales to bounce back by the end of the year.

Costly redundancies at AMD

Matt Thomas — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:34:59 +0000

Computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), has made 600 people redundant. The move had been widely predicted after a final quarter of 2008 that saw sales fall by 25 per cent from the previous quarter. To put that in perspective, that’s a difference of about $396 million dollars.

It can’t then, have come as a huge surprise to AMD’s employees that there would be redundancies, in fact the company had all but announced that 500 of its staff would be moving on. However, the fact that the eventual figure was considerably larger than that has come as a surprise to many.

The streamlining process will be far from cheap for AMD and is set to cost them around $34 million dollars in benefits and other severance payments. About $13 million more is expected to go on wrapping up projects and terminating contracts prematurely, closing down offices and factories will cost a mere $6 million. All of which wipes a cool $17 million off the value of the company’s assets as a whole.

Ironically, the cost-cutting plan is set to cost them $70 million all told, around $20 million more than they were expecting to spend.