First, anti-competitive. They're a monopolist in microprocessors for desktop / laptop. They've been allowed to retain that monopoly so long as they behave a certain way. They could try to squeeze AMD out of the market with very aggressive price cutting, and that would definitely be viewed as anti-competitive behavior by the US Government (and plausibly the EU and China; China is just starting to see the fruits of a very potent deal with AMD that could revolutionize their ability to build domestic processors to compete with Intel, zero chance they want to see Intel bury AMD now).
Second, there are few things investors hate to see more than aggressive margin erosion in a core product. Intel will restrain themselves from using that as a competitive hammer until or unless there are no other options (and by then it may be too late). They have a very large amount of margin to give up, doing so would have very damaging consequences to their stock. Intel's stock was in a pit of hell for 15 years, since the dotcom implosion. They just finally climbed out of that in the last year. They're sporting 25-27% style net income margins, which are classic Intel solid figures. They could smoke AMD any day of the week by smashing their margins, making processors entirely unprofitable for AMD and driving them out of the business, and then raising prices back to where they were. It's likely they simply can't reasonably take the risk entailed in doing that (both regulatory and Wall Street).
First, anti-competitive. They're a monopolist in microprocessors for desktop / laptop. They've been allowed to retain that monopoly so long as they behave a certain way. They could try to squeeze AMD out of the market with very aggressive price cutting, and that would definitely be viewed as anti-competitive behavior by the US Government (and plausibly the EU and China; China is just starting to see the fruits of a very potent deal with AMD that could revolutionize their ability to build domestic processors to compete with Intel, zero chance they want to see Intel bury AMD now).
Second, there are few things investors hate to see more than aggressive margin erosion in a core product. Intel will restrain themselves from using that as a competitive hammer until or unless there are no other options (and by then it may be too late). They have a very large amount of margin to give up, doing so would have very damaging consequences to their stock. Intel's stock was in a pit of hell for 15 years, since the dotcom implosion. They just finally climbed out of that in the last year. They're sporting 25-27% style net income margins, which are classic Intel solid figures. They could smoke AMD any day of the week by smashing their margins, making processors entirely unprofitable for AMD and driving them out of the business, and then raising prices back to where they were. It's likely they simply can't reasonably take the risk entailed in doing that (both regulatory and Wall Street).