EU hits Intel with US$1.44 billion antitrust fine

In today's podcast: EU hits Intel with US$1.44 billion antitrust fine; Windows 7 to be released by year end; and Intel says Oracle's Sun acquisition creates opportunity for Itanium.

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The European Commission Wednesday found Intel guilty of antitrust violations in the market for PC microprocessors and fined it [euro]1.06 billion, or US$1.44 billion. The fine dwarfs that against Microsoft which was fined [euro]497 million for abusing its dominant position in the software market, plus an additional [euro]1.2 billion for failing to respect the antitrust ruling. The Commission also ordered Intel to stop its illegal practices. The Commission investigation centered around charges that Intel illegally gave rebates to computer manufacturers in return for them buying the bulk of their x86 microprocessors from Intel. The company was also accused of paying computer makers to cancel or delay the launch of machines using chips made by rival, AMD, and of selling its chips for server computers at below cost to large customers such as governments and universities.

Windows 7 will be here by the holidays. Microsoft has revealed. The company officially announced the operating system would become available "in time for the holiday shopping season" on Monday, making reports of October Windows 7 release appear all the more reliable. The date may only be months away, but for Microsoft engineers, the work is far from finished. Here's a look at what'll happen behind-the-scenes between now and the release date, and what could still change within the Windows 7 software. Windows 7 is currently available for download as a public release candidate.

Oracle's decision to acquire Sun Microsystems has created a larger market opportunity for Intel to put its Itanium chips into more enterprise servers, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said on Tuesday. There is uncertainty surrounding the fate of Sun's Sparc chip, and Intel could fill that void to extend the reach of Itanium, Otellini said during at an investor conference webcast over the Internet. Oracle in April bought Sun for US$7.4 billion, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at the time it was most interested in Sun's Solaris OS and Java software. Ellison initially provided few details about what Oracle would do with the Sparc chips but last week said Oracle plans to stay in the hardware business and would increase its investment in Sparc.

A prototype device due to be shown in Tokyo Wednesday may give laptop computers a better shot at performing heavy-duty video processing. Space and heat considerations often limit the amount of computing power that can be packed into laptops. But Taiwan's Leadtek plans to unveil a prototype external video processor that brings the power of Toshiba's SpursEngine chip to portable platforms. The SpursEngine was developed by Toshiba and is based on the same architecture as the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor that powers the PlayStation 3 console. The chip also contains a hardware encoder and decoder for MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 video and is designed to be used as a PC co-processor handling of calculation-intensive work such a real-time high-definition graphics processing.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.