(Column) - A few months ago, AMD filed a lawsuit against Intel for unfair practices and taking unfair advantages of its monopolistic stature (a legal clause/act that seemed, so far, to be reserved/made exclusively for Microsoft).

What Intel had done (as AMD claimed) was basically arm-twist the vendors into reducing, or altogether ending, any business relations with AMD. In certain cases (Compaq/HP), Intel even withheld processor shipments as ‘punishment’ for doing business (or extensive business) with AMD.

However, recent events indicate that the tide could very well be changing and that’s the best news I’ve heard all year.

I recently wrote about how AMD outsold Intel in the U.S retail market in September, but more importantly, AMD appears to have outsold Intel (in terms of total units sold) for the month of October as well. If the world’s second largest chipmaker keeps this trend up through the holiday season, maybe it could outsell Intel throughout the entire quarter for the first time in its history.

The second win for AMD was that top online stores got rather scared of the whole legal mess and started stocking and selling more and more AMD processors. This obviously increased brand visibility, and since the processors are so much better and cheaper that Intel’s, they obviously sold them by the truckloads.

The third win was when Microsoft decided to design its 64-bit OS version using AMD’s architecture as a reference point instead of Intel. The wins however do not end there.

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