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VIA to Create Pentium 4 'Clone'
PyroMosh writes: "ZDNet is carrying a brief article about VIA's plans to start producing clones of the Pentium 4. VIA's already in legal trouble with Intel and it seems unlikley that this will go unchallenged by the chipmaking juggernaut. The Register is also covering this, and SiliconStrategies.com has an article with a bit more detail."
3Dnow.net links to the article at: http://www.theinquirer.net/19100103.htm that states that VIA denies this. Gotta love the opening paragraph.
AMD licenses the x86 instruction set from Intel.
Once you have reverse engineered the processor, why wouldn't you then put your resources into designing a better processor based on what you've learned, rather than wasting time making a clone?
Actually, it turns out that reverse-engineering is better for a couple of reasons.
When designing a chip, you have to make a host of design decisions without knowing for certain how each of them will affect performance (you try to make an intelligent gamble on picking the right approaches). If you have an existing architecture to copy, you know more or less what the tradeoff results actually were. This saves a lot of agonizing and design time.
AMD is big enough *now* to add its own instruction set extensions, but this is a fairly recent development. Anyone else has to make their chip fully compatible with either Intel or AMD (Intel for safety). This counts as "cloning" as far as the average tech article writer is concerned. Whether the microarchitectural approaches are copied as well is up to the clone maker.
I know that Via's not planning to make a P4 clone (yet). However, I believe that reverse-engineering would by far be the less costly approach for anyone attempting to clone the P4.