Way back in 2005, AMD filed a lawsuit against Intel that alleged that the company abused its market leading position to keep competition out of the marketplace. Part of the AMD allegations claim that Intel offered free products and large discounts to keep computer makers from using AMD processors.
Since the suit was filed in 2005 not much has been done in court other that delay after delay in actually bringing the case to trial. This week, the federal antitrust case against Intel was again postponed from its April 2009 day in court to a new date of February 2010.
EWeek reports that this is the second major delay in the case. The last major delay came in 2007 when Intel announced that it had erased documents and emails relating to the case. Intel maintains that it did not erase any important documents relating to the trial.
DailyTech reported in May 2008 that new documents in the case had been presented to detail AMDs complaints against Intel. At the time it was also reported that documents filed in the case had already exceeded 150 million pages and attorneys for both AMD and Intel still claim to have many more witnesses to depose.
Intel has had an up and down week; on June 5th it was fined $25 million in a South Korean antitrust case that found Intel had provided illegal rebates and discounts to keep computer makers from buying processors from AMD. However, the company drew amazement from many when early Nehalem benchmarks were revealed.