As to it being anti-competitive, there's nothing stopping AMD from making their own compiler that produces more optimal code and trusts everyone's processors to work as advertised.
Sure there is: time and money. Huge companies that are near-monopolies have enormous reservoirs of both in comparison to the competition.
What Intel is accused of doing is considered anti-competitive because they are not actually improving their product. Instead, they are using their stronger market position to degrade the value of another company's product. This harms the overall market, and particularly the consumers. Hence, it's illegal.
Re:Intel's "cripple AMD" function
by bensummers on Sunday January 03, 2010 @04:39PM
(#1029186)
The objection in the article is not what the compiler does, but how it's advertised. If it was claimed to be an optimizing compiler "for Intel CPUs only", then there would be no problem.
(Of course, if they did that, would people use it?)
The results of incorrect code generation on any given platform would more likely be people ceasing to use Intel's compiler, and that's not something they want to deal with, I'm sure. As to it being anti-competitive, there's nothing stopping AMD from making their own compiler that produces more optimal code and trusts everyone's processors to work as advertised. If it produced better results, people would likely use it.