Intel has a common design strategy of making two different teams work on the exact same project, without even knowing about the existence of the other.

That's just BS. I have worked at Intel, and while there were projects that wind up with significant overlap and do get canceled, it is NOT the case that the projects don't know about each other. I saw projects get canceled because there was only so many people to work on projects, and with projects A, B, C, and D all in various stages, project B needed to be canceled and people moved to C and D because there was no way to do all of them with the budget constraints - and if B got canceled, C would be coming soon enough afterward (within 6-9 months) and cover most of the target market that B was going after.

Bad for morale - but a necessary business decision.

It definitely wasn't the case though that they were on the exact same project, nor that they didn't know about the other team. (Working on the exact same project would be just plain wasteful - and management at Intel is not very tolerant of that kind of waste in my experience.)

(Speaking for myself and not for Intel obviously)

> They also offered special pricing, not for volume, but for "loyalty." They would give their customers a break if
> they were 100% intel customers and not "Buy 10,000 units and get 200 free, which would likely have been legal.

To be more accurate, AMD claims that Intel offered a break to customers if they were 100% Intel.
While Intel has stated that they did not do that, but only offered breaks based on absolute volume numbers.
(ie. Intel claims they would tell the OEM you get X price for Y volume. And if the OEM got Y volume that's the price they got, whether they sold just Y volume of Intel products or sold Y volume of Intel products and N volume of AMD (or cyrix or idt or via or ....) products.

Intel salespeople *KNOW* that any deal they make - for that matter, anything they say - can be used against Intel in an antitrust investigation of Intel. And if they were to make a deal such as you suggest, IMO they would be fired as soon as their manager found out. (Unless you believe that their manager, and all the way up the chain of management the people are incompetent... Given their success in the marketplace, I don't think they're incompetent)

Personally, I believe that Intel's management and salesforce are competent enough to stay just on the legal side of the antitrust laws.
I would bet that in 18 months, this investigation will have found basically nothing - no smoking gun like some AMD fans think is out there - and the investigation will be closed without a trial.