Pittige posting bij JC, waar men de geruchten dat Intel fabrikante van Athlon planken onder druk zet door de levering van BX en ZX chipsets te stagneren, nieuw leven in blaast. Twee maand geleden zei onze vriend Tom (toch al niet bepaald pro-Intel) ook al zo iets:
A very disturbing usenet post by Dean Kent, a former reseller who kept his many contacts and moved on to create a "behind the scenes" hardware website. He has some very shocking stuff to say, and I fear he may have severely severed some or many of his contacts because of this. He asserts that Intel is not reimbursing anyone for the tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of i820 boards created before Intel announced them as junk at the last minute before the Camino almost-introduction. He also says something along the lines of"In August, there was a little pressure from Intel to keep manufacturers from making Athlon boards - but it has been steadily increasing ... Intel has begun using [BX/ZX shippment constraining] as leverage to punish those who make non-Intel based boards".
Dean goes on a bit and cites a couple examples. This is rather concerning. I mean, I'm all for Intel improving their microarchitectures (and making new ones -- jeez, I've been panting for Willamette for the past two years, come on already!) and I've no trouble if they market at more attractive price points. I'd even be generally okay if they started lying out their asses like Steve Jobs (face it, he's a smart guy, and I do like Apple's design strategy, but the term "truth in advertising" isn't in his vocabulary) and started overmarketing their products with the finesse of the "Got Milk" people (actually, the rocketship and moon commercial for the PIII is really sweet!). But if Intel is even slightly doing what Dean is suggesting, I'd totally condemn them. It's a very, very uncompetitive and rude thing to go to companies that support you and say something akin to "If you look the other way, we know where you live. We know where your wife gets her hair styled, and we know where your children like to play".
I remember that Tom Pabst, famous ranter, was ranting about this very thing and while I listen to him generally, I didn't take his words too seriously. I hope my shunning those rants wasn't a mistake those months ago.
