I worked for a major computer manufacturer within marketing and engaged in a number of co-marketing projects with Intel. I say co-marketing, they would essentially consist of us coming up with something and doing the leg work and just having the invoices for anything billable land with Intel. They needed to approve what you were doing but the process was very easy. The way it worked, and the way it still works to my knowledge, is like this:

You buy Intel product and a fraction of the cost of buying those products ends up in a war chest for marketing. You can spend these funds by doing things like co-marketing activities or putting a logo on an advert (they would pay x% of your advert cost then) and so on and so forth. This is more common than just Intel, Microsoft does just the same. That's why there's a Microsoft slogan on every print advert. By the time you do both, you end up paying less than half the actual cost of the advert.

Now this is on one hand a reasonable system. Just like manufacturers have chucked in cash to co-fund ads with distributors since the beginning of time... On the other hand, that war chest is only there if you're buying their products. This makes the business case of buying stuff from the other guy all the more difficult. It means really you're advertising Intel stuff because, honestly, AMD isn't going to write any cheques. The fact that Intel's business is larger than just the CPU itself means you get economies of scale here too.

Is this anti competetive. Well, I think some aspect of it is. However most of it is just a symptom of the fact that it becomes easier to work with the really big guy. It has always been more pleasant to work with them than AMD. You get samples of stuff when you ask, you get marketing help, they run cool events, they actively assign a dude to look after your account who is a genuinely helpful human being. You get precisely none of that with AMD. In fact AMD, as a point of order, probably has the worst marketing set up I have ever encountered in my career. It was amusing when they bought ATI because they were probably the 2nd worst...

What's the solution here? It feels like it's a business that is having trouble with scale. AMD isn't big enough to 'compete' just because they make a CPU. They aren't anything near big enough. They need to consolidate into solutions (buying ATI was part of that obviously) and be able to offer manufacturers the same sort of product range and attractive business proposition as Intel does. It's not anti competetive, it just makes doing business with you more attractive.

What all of this really boils down to, and why I wont shed a tear for a huge fine such as the EU fine, is that the reason Intel is in the position is because of distinctly anti-competetive behavior in the past. I never experienced that myself but if you've become the dominent player through dirty tricks then cleaning your act up in recent times isn't realy good enough is it? Unfortunately even a billion euros is kind of shutting the door after the horse is bolted.