Intel Pays AMD The $1.25 Billion It Owed, AMD Throws A Check-Cashing Party
According to the release, the payment "settles monetary terms regarding an agreement over a number of antitrust patent disputes," and of course this also means that the two are exchanging patent rights at the very beginning of their five-year agreement. It's tough to say what AMD will end up doing with the cash, but it's definitely a lot of dough to just receive all of a sudden. Will it fast-track mobile platform chips? Bust out a consumer level 16-core CPU? Just use it to buy anti-Intel ads? Only time will tell, but we're sure hoping the cash will enable the company to make a really serious push in the coming year to gaining back some of that market share it has lost.