Intel has been ordered to hand in more documents to its arch-rival AMD, as part of the antitrust lawsuit initiated in 2007. According to the judges, the new documents will play a key role in finding whether Intel is guilty or not of antitrust behavior in Europe and China.

Intel began collecting critical data about its activity as soon as it found out that AMD started the legal dispute. The company followed the standard operating procedure and collected, filed and documented information coming from its 4,000 sales and marketing employees. Intel also started backing up e-mails and conversations regarding its collaborations with major hardware vendors and companies.

Although the company backed up most of the data related to sales, Intel testified for the existence of "a number of inadvertent mistakes in the implementation of [its] described preservation policies. These... issues are the result of human errors and include... some employees' retention practices were incomplete on an individual level, some employees were not given timely notice to retain materials, some terminated employees' documents may not have been saved, and the fail-safe plan to prepare back-up tapes missed some employees."

More than that, certain employees did not save their sent or received e-mail messages. Intel employees also erased a few backup tapes that contained commercial activities across Europe, although the company claims that it had specifically asked tech staff to retain all the data until the final court verdict.

"Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed," said AMD spokespersons.

However, AMD seems to be extremely suspicious about the "accidental deletion," and requested the chip manufacturer to turn over all the documents related to "the failure or suspected failure of any Intel custodian to comply with a Litigation Hold Notice or retention instruction, including the timing and means by which it was discovered."

Court-appointed Special Master Vincent J. Poppiti ordered Intel to hand AMD all the relevant documents, as they were not covered by either attorney-client privilege or work-product privilege. These documents could play a key role in determining whether Intel deliberately destroyed the information or it was a mere accident.