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AMD Wants To Depose 486 People in Intel Case

AMD Says "Intel Has Made Sure That the Written Record Tells Little of the Story"

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, AMD has not added anything new to its antitrust charges against Intel – just some color – mostly black redactions – even after riffling through the 145 million pages of discovery that Intel turned over to it.

According to AMD, “Intel has made sure that the written record tells little of the story.”

The case has now reached the deposition stage and what’s new this week is the revelation that AMD wants the right to take 48 times more depositions than the federal standard allows.

See, more than 10 and you’ve got to get the judge to agree.

AMD wants to take 486 depositions, a fact that, of course, assumes a simply staggering legal bill that it can ill-afford, but it’s not skimping on time or money, evidently counting on Intel getting stuck with the bill eventually.

It wants to depose 206 Intel staffers and 280 customers and figures it’ll take nine or 10 months to do it.

When Intel and AMD started arguing over how many depositions there should be the special master in charge of evidence, Vincent Poppiti, told them to each give him a 100-page synopsis of their case and map out where the witnesses intersect their main points.

Redacted versions of the briefs were made public Monday – very heavily redacted in AMD’s case – blacking out AMD’s witness list and all the salacious details behind its charges.

In its piece, Intel suggests that each side get 75 depositions, 50 each to question the other’s executives, managers, sales people and engineers and another 25 each to call OEMs to testify.

It names the 50 current and former AMD people it wants to depose – all the brand names and then some – and redacts the third parties.

The pair has until May 12 to answer each other’s position and there’ll be oral arguments June 5.

AMD alleges that Intel’s discounts, rebates and subsidies amount to unfair business practices and that Intel threatened OEMs so they wouldn’t use AMD’s processors by withdrawing marketing funds and withholding technical information.

Reading around the blackouts, it accuses Intel of paying Dell, Gateway, Acer, the major Japanese OEMs, Sony, NEC, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Hitachi, and white box makers like Supermicro and Rackable for exclusivity and claims it paid IBM, Lenovo and Gateway to cancel or delay AMD-based platforms.

It says in one place that HP, which AMD says hasn’t turned over any discovery yet, would only take 160,000 of the million free identify-redacted processors AMD offered it, claiming “no rational computer manufacturer would leave 840,000 free state-of-the-art microprocessors on the table unless it had been foreclosed from using them by exclusionary.”

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More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

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AMD News Desk 05/09/08 01:06:10 PM EDT

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, AMD has not added anything new to its antitrust charges against Inte