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No, I am not going to regurgitate AMD's paid-for study about how much Intel had earned over ten years based on the very hard-to-prove issue of their behaving in a monopolistic manner.

No doubt Intel has already rubbished such studies and the actual legal fight drags on, but with real money ($millions) being used.

The point I want to raise is that if AMD had found itself in a free and open market with Intel expounding the most open good business practices, then how much business would it have gained starting back those ten years?

Please correct me if I am wrong, but AMD never had the capital to build more than one 200mm fab at any time and didn't have competitive products then either! Its product portfolio to cater for all the markets Intel was supporting was also negligible and would have required significant scaling of its design teams in order to even contemplate competing in an open market.

The possible impact, in reality, is much later than this and therefore potentially a much smaller dollar amount.

There is also the classic issue over ‘first to market' in which other studies have shown that he who gets there first tends to become the largest market share holder and the key dominant player without the word ‘monopolistic' being used.

Ironically, we have an existing duopoly in operation but this is not following generally accepted economic theory surrounding the ‘Bertrand Duopoly' model or ‘Nash Equilibrium.'

I would also like to point out that with AMD's recently announced refresh of future product offerings it needs to be careful of the ‘Osborne Effect' (no known relation)!

So you see it could be worse!

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect)