Rambus is involved in legal action with each of those companies. If you want more details than they provide , check out our news item from earlier this week. If you read closely what he's saying, he keeps insisting that he doesn't expect a price war and that AMD is not looking for a price war. By price war, I believe he means something more dramatic than is going on at the moment, and something that would actually damage Intel or AMD in a major way. The current cuts are nice, but I don't see them actually causing losses at either company.
Chips are a very profitable business.
Via, Intel, and P4 chipsets - Via is still in talks with Intel about getting an official license to sell P4 chipsets. Intel is asking for large licensing fees , according to Silicon Strategies. At the same time, Via is balking because they say that they can legally manufacture the chipsets whether Intel likes it or not due to their purchase of the graphics business of S3, which had a major cross-licensing agreement with Intel. So far, there's no word of Intel caring about Via bringing DDR to the P4 platform. Perhaps it's just about money.