While they battle it out in the marketplace with multiple cores as the weapons of choice, Intel and AMD are also fighting in court with legal motions hurled back and forth.
In the latest round of this antitrust skirmish, Intel filed a reply to AMD’s motion to compel Intel to produce documents containing what it said is evidence of coercion and other misconduct aimed at its foreign microprocessor customers.
The case blew up last year when AMD sued Intel
  over claims it unlawfully protected a monopoly in the x86 microprocessor market by shunting customers away from AMD.
Earlier this year, Intel filed a motion to have the case restricted to U.S. sales. Intel argued that since the bulk of AMD’s chips were made and sold overseas, foreign courts should deal with that, and the trial in the U.S. should be restricted to U.S. sales.
In September, the judge hearing the case ruled in Intel’s favor, limiting the U.S. trial to just U.S. sales.
Today, Intel filed a 36 page brief with the court citing Judge Farnan’s September ruling and claiming it did not have to disclose the foreign information, more or less saying it was too much trouble.
“The Japan OEMs and other third parties have made clear that to comply with the AMD subpoenas would disrupt their business operations and force these companies to incur millions of dollars in expenses to identify, extract, translate, review and produce the requested documents,” Intel’s army of lawyers wrote in the filing.
AMD was not pleased.
“Intel’s reply makes clear that it continues to refuse to turn over documents that are central to the discovery in the AMD v. Intel litigation, citing Judge Farnan’s September ruling, which barred recovery for lost sales of foreign-made AMD microprocessors to foreign customers,” said Michael Silverman, a spokesman for AMD, in an email sent to internetnews.com
Silverman said the September review, which is being appealed, “has absolutely nothing to do with the legal and factual merits of the allegations of Intel’s misconduct. And it does not stand as a bar to AMD’s discovery of evidence that Intel coerced foreign customers from dealing with it, particularly given the harm this foreclosure caused to AMD’s export business of selling domestically manufactured processors to foreign customers.”
But Intel is sticking to its guns when it comes to the Farnan ruling.
“Our motion outlines our position that Judge Farnan’s ruling on jurisdiction makes it clear the AMD must prove a “direct” economic impact of the alleged violations. Neither AMD’s initial opposition to our Subject Matter Jurisdiction motion or its latest filing meets that standard,” Chuck Mulloy, a spokesmen for Intel said to internetnews.com.
The ball is now in AMD’s court, which has to reply to Intel by next Monday, November 20. The Special Master in the case has scheduled a hearing on November 29th. There will also be a status conference with the judge in December.