The move, instigated by AMD's complaints, comes like an answer to an maiden's prayer just as AMD, down $600 million in the June quarter, is reeling from its price wars with its much larger competitor.

The EC secret statement of objections reportedly charges Intel with exclusionary restraint, naked restraint and predatory pricing.

Sources say the regulators take exception to Intel's rebates and discounts said to reward OEMs for buying the bulk of their processors from Intel and an alleged practice that has been dubbed "Stop Launch" that discourages OEMs from announcing new products when AMD announces new chips.

The EC charges reflect the allegations that AMD has made in its pending private antitrust actions against Intel.

Intel had nothing to say Thursday in advance of an EC press conference Friday. The EC has confirmed that it issued the SO.

The news neatly capped an analyst meeting that AMD held Thursday at which it added little to Wall Street's visibility into the firm.

Although it denies that it will become a fabless semiconductor maker, it has yet to clarify exactly what its so-called "asset-lite" plans to cut its crippling capital expenditures actually involve or what it calls its "FlexFab" plan actually entails.

Apparently it's still in discussion with existing or potential partners. There's not supposed to be any impact until next year when at best it will be able to produce, say, 95 million-105 million chips.

AMD also shared a few specifics on upcoming chips. It acknowledged the Q4 delivery of a 3GHz Phenom quad-core desktop and the '08 release of the Puma mobile platform but gave little in the way of a Barcelona update, though people are disappointed that it will start next month at only 2GHz.

It said it would have 45nm desktops next year and quad-core notebook chips in 2009 with the first of the "Fusion" processor family, code named Falcon, AMD's mating of CPU and GPU.

Falcon will offer an integrated, unified shading architecture and DirectX GPU core for enhanced graphics processing. It's part of AMD's Eagle notebook platform.

AMD has two next-generation CPU cores on the drawing board: Bulldozer for the server and client markets and Bobcat for the mobile, ultra-mobile and consumer electronics markets.

Bulldozer is supposed to deliver a "dramatic" increase in throughput-oriented performance-per-watt, and be partitioned for future scalability and modularity. Bobcat's designed for energy efficiency and performance-per-watt, reportedly scaling as low as 1 watt.

AMD's new 45nm server processor family, code named Shanghai, is due in mid-'08 in answer to Intel's Penryn quad. Besides improving on Barcelona's core design, Shanghai includes 6MB of L3 cache.

AMD is developing chipsets for its next-generation 2009 server and workstation platforms, which will include octal-core processors, code named Sandtiger that introduces Direct Connect Architecture 2, with HyperTransport 3.0, highly scalable memory and I/O performance.

Its 45nm desktop chip family called Ridgeback is expected in mid-'08 with 6MB of L3 cache, HyperTransport 3.0, Split Plane and a new AM2+ socket that's forward- and backward-compatible with existing AM2 motherboards.