Submission + - AMD and Nvidia accused of price fixing
blahplusplus writes: You know how
NVIDIA and AMD got slapped with those federal subpoenas a week ago? At the
time, no one was sure what the DoJ was getting at, but apparently it wasn't just
to look at the pretty graphics these firms churn out. Turns out NVIDIA, AMD and
ATI have been accused of
some antitrust
shenanigans, with the DoJ alleging the firms "have engaged in a contract
combination, trust or conspiracy, the effect of which was to raise the prices at
which they sold graphics processing units and cards to artificially inflated
levels." We're not so sure that the main argument — that graphics card prices
are almost always the same, reaching around $500 in the high end — will hold a
lot of water, given the specs pumping nature of the graphics card biz, but
allegations of secret meetings between graphics card execs to discuss pricing
could be a bit more damning. The DoJ is requesting documents as far back as
1990, so this could get messy
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