The Federal Trade Commission may have another set of anti-trust allegations to put to Intel in the future: the bundling of the Pentium II chipset with Intel’s i740 graphics chip. The San Francisco Chronicle yesterday quoted two industry analysts who were claiming that Intel had been insisting that PC vendors use the i740 chip if they wanted to secure a volume supply of Pentium II chips and chipsets. The paper quoted 4thWave Inc analyst John Latta and John Peddie of John Peddie Associates as confirming the allegations, which it says is particularly affecting Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers. Intel denied the report. At the time of the i740 launch back in February (CI No 3,347) Gartner Group analyst Joe D’elia said that despite Intel’s lack of experience in the 3D graphics market, the company’s acquisition of Chips & Technologies, and its cooperation with and financial stake in Orlando, Florida-based Real 3D Inc, would go some way towards establishing its credibility. He saw the launch as the first step towards developing graphics technologies that will one day be integrated together with a CPU and logic components on a single chip.
