WILL THE BATTLE FOR CPU SUPREMACY PUSH THE RIVALS TOGETHER?

For years, neither company has been able to claim absolute victory. But as Amazon, Apple, Google, and other tech giants design and manufacture their own processors, will AMD and Intel circle their wagons?

- TOM BRANT

Email can be a killer: Just ask New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who discovered some scandalous messages during a multinational investigation of Intel, the American semiconductor giant.

The Intel emails, made public by Cuomo in 2009 when he was New York’s state attorney general, appeared to show that the company was taking a carrot-and-stick approach to ensuring that its customers used Intel processors for all, or nearly all, of the PCs that they sold. This might not rank as one of history’s most revelatory email brouhahas, but it was a vital factor in a billion-dollar settlement that would drastically change the semiconductor industry—and the wider tech world that relies on it. The effect is still felt in courtrooms and boardrooms worldwide and is, without a doubt, in the back of the minds of salespeople the world over. And it’s still a driving factor behind one of today’s fiercest tech rivalries: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) versus Intel.