AMD and Intel have been trading shots through the court docket since AMD first filed its antitrust lawsuit against Intel in 2005, so it's not particularly surprising to see a new 108-page filing from Sunnyvale and a prompt and massive reply from Santa Clara. AMD's filing does, however, contain a few new bits of information amongst the heavily-redacted pages, and one brand-new, surprising assertion.

The first section of AMD's filing tromps over familiar ground; Sunnyvale gives its version of microprocessor history, the rise of AMD as an Intel competitor, the golden age of Opteron (2004-2006), and the various illegal and abusive actions it accuses Intel of over these periods. In brief, AMD claims that Intel has paid major OEMs (directly or indirectly) not to carry AMD products, has paid manufacturers to avoid building AMD solutions that target certain market sectors, has paid OEMs to abandon AMD platforms they initially agreed to launch, and has used all-or-nothing discounts as a means of locking OEMs into Intel products. While the rest of these alleged misconducts are fairly self-explanatory, all-or-nothing discounts merit an explanation.

The (alleged) system works as follows. In a given quarter, an OEM will purchase 100 CPUs. Of those 100 chips, 80 of them are going to be Intel chips, while 20 would be AMD chips, assuming an 80/20 market split between AMD and Intel. Given this scenario, our hypothetical OEM goes to Intel to negotiate a price for the 80 processors it wishes to purchase. Intel is willing to sell 80 processors at $100 each, but it's also interested in cutting a deal. If the OEM will commit to buying 90 percent of its processors from Intel this quarter (90 chips, in this case), Intel, in turn, will sell the chips for $80 apiece. If the OEM fails to sell a product mixture that works out to be 90 percent Intel, however, it receives no discount at all.

This leaves Intel's chief competitor with two equally unappealing options. Either AMD accepts Intel's maneuvering, and competes only for the last 10 percent of the market available to it, or AMD subsidizes the discount the OEM would've received over just 20 processor sales. This particular allegation isn't new—AMD included it in its original 2005 filing—but it forms a substantial part of the company's claim against Intel.

Having listed the various ways in which Intel allegedly abuses its monopoly position, AMD launches into the heart of its argument. In taking such actions, Intel has excluded AMD from fairly competing in the market and placed the company in a vice it cannot escape. From the filing: "Up until the June 2005 filing of this lawsuit and contemporaneous international enforcement actions that caused Intel to moderate its misconduct... AMD's technologic successes earned it a lower share of desktop and notebook revenues than it had achieved during most of 2001 and early 2002. Through the end of 2008, it garnered roughly 13 percent of total x86 microprocessor revenues, less than half of what it requires to operate long-term as a sustainable business."

This last, for the record, is something of a bombshell. AMD has never named a specific revenue target under which it could not sustain itself as a going concern. It should be noted, however, that this projection is obviously long-range and/or contingent upon future operations. Over the past eight years, AMD's highest share of the microprocessor market by revenue was the fourth quarter of 2006, in which the company earned 16 percent revenue share. It's not clear how AMD accounted for the 26 percent revenue share figure, although more than doubling its current income would obviously drastically improve the company's financial situation.

Discovery in this case is ongoing, but AMD makes a point of noting the degree of Intel's "cooperation," stating that "What it [Intel] contends amounts to the equivalent of 140 million pages has just been produced, much in the past 90 days. Additional caches of documents are being received continuously from Intel's customers, though many, including important OEMs such as HP, have yet to produce their first document."

Intel's response to AMD's latest filing is straightforward and to the point, as expressed in its filing: "AMD's complaint about Intel's discounting boils down to a complaint that Intel is a more efficient competitor." The company hammers this home even further later in the document, when it states: "Its [AMD] brief period of a computing performance advantage with the Opteron microprocessor cannot mask AMD's historical and current position as a laggard in computing performance, its consistent record of failing to offer suitable solutions to corporate customers, or competitive products for the notebook (or mobile) market segment, and finally its well deserved reputation for unreliability, among other deficiencies."

If you're interested in this case, I recommend reading AMD's original 2005 filing. The company goes into detail regarding the claims it makes against Intel and names specific companies, time periods, and actions it alleges are evidence of Intel's illegal behavior. Intel, for its part, continues to insist that while it most definitely plays hardball, none of its actions rise to the level of market abuse or are evidence of monopolistic behavior.

There's a legal difference between playing all out against a much smaller competitor and cheating. If AMD's allegations and Intel's counter-filings agree on one point, it's that Intel is a fierce and unrelenting competitor. Whether or not the company's behavior has ever damaged consumers, however, is a very open question. According to the current schedule, 11 months from now, AMD will have its day in court—and a chance to prove its been illegally blocked from competing fairly.