How Intel cheated over years to become the ''Monopolist''

Year 2005

It all started when AMD had the Athlon 64 put ahead of everything Intel had available and they were making tons of money off its sales. 

Suddenly, sales went dry and benchmarks began to run better on Intel despite real world deltas being much smaller than synthetics reflected. Can you guess why? Because Intel paid PC manufacturers out of its own pocket for years to not buy AMD's chips. Although they were faster, manufacturers went with the bribe because the amount they made from that outweighed the amount they get from happy customers buying their powerful computers. 

Thus, the industry began to stagnate a bit with CPUs not really moving forward as quickly. They also attacked all existing AMD chips by sabotaging their compiler, making it intentionally run slower on all existing and future AMD chips[1]. Not just temporarily, but permanently[2]; all versions of software created with that version of the compiler[3] will forever run worse on AMD chips, even in 2020 (and yes, some benchmark tools infected with it are still used today!)[4].

tl;dr, from Anandtech's summary:

• Intel rewarded OEMs to not use AMD’s processors through various means, such as volume discounts, withholding advertising & R&D money, and threatening OEMs with a low-priority during CPU shortages.
• Intel reworked their compiler to put AMD CPUs at a disadvantage. For a time Intel’s compiler would not enable SSE/SSE2 codepaths on non-Intel CPUs, our assumption is that this is the specific complaint. To our knowledge this has been resolved for quite some time now (as of late 2010).
• Intel paid/coerced software and hardware vendors to not support or to limit their support for AMD CPUs. This includes having vendors label their wares as Intel compatible, but not AMD compatible.
• False advertising. This includes hiding the compiler changes from developers, misrepresenting benchmark results (such as BAPCo Sysmark) that changed due to those compiler changes, and general misrepresentation of benchmarks as being “real world” when they are not.
• Intel eliminated the future threat of NVIDIA’s chipset business by refusing to license the latest version of the DMI bus (the bus that connects the Northbridge to the Southbridge) and the QPI bus (the bus that connects Nehalem processors to the X58 Northbridge) to NVIDIA, which prevents them from offering a chipset for Nehalem-generation CPUs.
• Intel “created several interoperability problems” with discrete CPUs, specifically to attack GPGPU functionality. We’re actually not sure what this means, it may be a complaint based on the fact that Lynnfield only offers single PCIe x16 connection coming from the CPU, which wouldn’t be enough to fully feed two high-end GPUs.
• Intel has attempted to harm GPGPU functionality by developing Larrabee. This includes lying about the state of Larrabee hardware and software, and making disparaging remarks about non-Intel development tools.
• In bundling CPUs with IGP chipsets, Intel is selling them at below-cost to drive out competition. Given Intel’s margins, we find this one questionable. Below-cost would have to be extremely cheap.
• Intel priced Atom CPUs higher if they were not used with an Intel IGP chipset.
• All of this has enhanced Intel’s CPU monopoly.

The rest is history. AMD slowly lost money, stopped being able to make chips that live up to the Athlon 64, etc. The snowball kept rolling until bribery wasn't even necessary anymore, they pretty much just own the market now. Any fine would be a drop in the bucket compared to how much they can make by charging whatever they want.

But guess what? AMD hired the original creator of the Athlon 64 and put him in charge of Zen back in 2012. 

'the change' is here | underdog rose to challenge the titan.. 

Intel, even with all their cheating and lies, has rarely been able to beat AMD at performance per dollar. Now you know why I favor AMD over Intel; its not just just the cost or performance but its principle. If AMD sells a chip that is fast enough for your needs, it's probably cheaper than the Intel alternative.