Intel’s Munich offices and the offices of European retailers were raided by the European Commission. The EC is looking for evidence that Intel unlawfully fixed prices or had other types of underhanded deals to shut AMD out of the market. So far, it isn’t clear if it found anything it was looking for, but both Intel and the retailers cooperated.
Read more on that at the Guardian.
In related Intel news, a University of Wisconsin research group is suing Intel and seeking to stop the sale of Core 2 processors. However unlikely it would be to stop the sale of the top selling processor, the U of W group has a patent dated July 1998, which describes a method of using a table to store branch prediction failures for future predictions. Why is this “idea” patentable? I don’t know. Why do we even have a patent system? Not for this stuff, I would hope.
Anyhow, check out The TechReport for more details.