FTC bears down on Intel

Commission files suit over dealings with Nvidia.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed suit against Intel over its business dealings with Nvidia and system vendors.

The complaint rehashes the claims made by rival AMD that Intel had illegally sought to obtain an advantage in the market by coercing system builders to drop AMD products and deliberately changing code in an attempt to slow software performance on AMD's chips.

Although AMD and Intel recently agreed to a settlement that ended the civil case, antitrust actions, such as those filed by the FTC, remained open.

In addition to the dealings with AMD, the commission also alleged misconduct in Intel's relationship with graphics card vendor Nvidia. In August the two sides agreed to end a licensing battle.

"Having succeeded in slowing adoption of competing CPU chips over the past decade until it could catch up to competitors like Advanced Micro Devices, Intel allegedly once again finds itself falling behind the competition, this time in the critical market for graphics processing units," said the FTC.

"Intel has responded to this competitive challenge by embarking on a similar anticompetitive strategy, which aims to preserve its CPU monopoly by smothering potential competition from GPU chips such as those made by Nvidia."

Intel wasted no time in firing back against the FTC with a statement of its own, claiming the commission acted without fully investigating the case.

"The FTC's case is misguided. It is based largely on claims that the FTC added at the last minute and has not investigated," Intel said.

"In addition, it is explicitly not based on existing law but is instead intended to make new rules for regulating business conduct. These new rules would harm consumers by reducing innovation and raising prices."