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End of Intel-Pin-Compatible CPUs?
sonamchauhan writes ""Intel, Via bury the hatchet" proclaims this news.com article. The settlement reportedly allows Via to build Intel-pin-compatible CPUs for three years more, but Via must cease pin-compatibility after that."
This settlement apparently closes out 27 existing lawsuits.
Woo!
Well, pin compatibility isn't the issue I'd be concerned with, but opcode compatibility.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
just as I was saying the other night that i wished VIA would make C3s that go in AMD-socket boards...
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and so attatched to the board anyway, making pin compatibility a non-issue.
Man, I was so happy the day I bought an AMD-compatible mobo. AMD's are not, of course, pin-compatible with Intel. AMD is not a perfect angel, but they're a sight better than Intel, especially when you consider you can get the same power as an Intel chip in an AMD chip for typically half to one-third the price. It was a difficult choice to make since it meant forevermore sacrificing the resuability of intel processors motehrboards I already owned, but I'm glad I did.
My friends who retain Intel compatibility continue to pay top dollar for less power. If I think it's time for a cpu upgrade, I simply go to my local AMD redistributor and pay about the cost of two boxed games for a chip that is more than fast enough than anything I care to do with it.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I believe the lindows pcs in wallmart uses the via c3 chips. Not exactly a fps gamers dream machine, but does make the machine very affordable. I think the desktops were about 200 dollars minus the monitor.
But, aside from the lower performing chip, it does it's job as a email/web browsing/messaging/word document editing/music playing home workstation.
From the article, 11 legal suits are involved which reference 27 different patents from either side.
because you are correct. Pentium 4 is a lousy chip, the pentium 3 not much better. Pentium II was the last truly respectable chip I have seen coming out of Intel. AMDs may run a bit hot, but their performance IMO is superior. Transmeta should make motherboards for "build yer own" types who want them. VIA has increasingly made more and more respectable chips as time goes on, and for cents on the dollar to the Intel CPU. The only thing keeping Pentium-line procs afloat is marketing at this point.
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According to the article, "The settlement--which involves 11 cases filed in five countries--will essentially make it far easier for Via to sell processors and chipsets to PC makers."
Where did the 27 come from? Oh, wait: "In total, 27 patents were at issue in the various cases."
Man, reading comprehension must be in short supply these days. There were 11 lawsuits involving 27 patents.
Speaking of reading comprehension, the settlement is for the following:
"For the first three years, Intel has agreed not to sue Via for making processors that come with buses and pin structures that are similar to Intel's products. Similarly, Intel has granted Via a license to make chipsets that are pin- and bus-compatible with Intel products for four years, and has agreed not to sue Via or its customers for using pin- and bus-compatible chipsets for another year beyond that."
So they can essientially get away with selling them for FIVE years, not three.
Geez...
...continue to buy competing chips that conform to standardized pin-outs, and blow non-conforming hardware right the fsck off.
No whining about businesses trying to control markets through proprietary hardware and software. The logic for so doing is clear.
Just say 'no' to the proprietary pusher-man.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Does this mean they will be producing a C4 which will beat the trousers off the P4, Or will they perhaps begin working on a P4Killer that will only work on a VIA board and will include a RNG and a FPU. Or will they try to take advantage of the Tight integration and Produce a really inexpensive Chipset which will include an off-die FPU like the x87 series.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I do.
:)
Having a fanless computer is really nice
Of course, what's to stop some clever young upstart from being willing to raise his CPU off the board by an addition 3 to 4 mm, to place a special ceramic enclosure between the CPU and the board? This enclosure would do nothing more than swap the pins back (sorta like a null modem cable). Of course, this would probably also require a slightly different cooling solution, but at least it's doable.
And there you have it. VIA's chipsets can work with Intel's CPUS and Intel's chipsets can work with VIA's CPU's once again. All VIA has to do is *NOT* be the manufacturer of the conversion enclosure.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Isn't this blatantly anti competitive. Not mercurially illegal but stifling competition.
If there were a standard chip/motherboard interface then you would be able to choose the chip that you want and the board that you want based on your preferences. Once this grace period is over (3 years) you will have less combinations available.
When are businesses going to realise open standards = growth.
Mind you I use mini-itx at home anyway so I shouldn't complain.
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=15
Via makes a number of low-power (as in Watts) CPU's.
They also make chipsets for, among other things, P-IV. The chipsets don't really contain any processors as such, just memory/IDE/USB controllers etc.
No you cannot buy an Athlon and put it in a P4 motherboard, they are not pin-compatible (diff pin structure and number of pins on the chip as well as the socket) or bus compatible(bus architecture is completely different). The pin compatibility Via got is so they can make their chips compatible with Intel chipsets on Motherboards. I.E. You coulld buy an Intel-based motherboard, and put a Via chip in it.
"I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin"
The Register has an article about it as well.
Now this brings up the question on what teh chipset clause means for the industry. I know I have via chipsets on my Athlon boards, and it seems likely that VIA will keep producing theese, but what about the Intel market? Does this mean that there will be a player less in that market in five years? Its a rather long time, perhaps the current hardware model is obsoleted by then? MiniATX + integrated systems + Palladium (TPC, was that what it was called?).
I didn't do this, now did I?
absolutely. There are a number of the inexpensive Linux boxes sold at walmart.com that run C3 processors
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I also have a fanless computer.
--Drunk as in Beer
I'm too lazy to google or anything, but why do you think we have a non intel-socket compatable AMD system?
(Granted I love the alpha bus... yum. Thats a whole different can of worms)
The Tualatin (and to some extent, Coppermine) PIIIs and Celerons were incredibly good...clock for clock better than PIV. The "dirty little secret" about Banias/Centrino is that it is not based on the PIV core, but the PIII. This is why they talk about Centrino and Pentium-M, not about where in the Intel continuum the Pentium-M actually belongs.
I want to see the Centrino platform on the desktop. But we never will see it, because it would embarrass Intel and point up how failed the PIV architecture is.
Oh yeah, one more thing. VIA has been selling the CIII as part of the EPIA Mini-ITX platform, not really as a separate chip, and I suspect the tight connection between CIII and EPIA will be even tighter by the time this injunction takes effect three years from now.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
To be slightly pedantic, can't anyone get the name of the company right?
It's even written on all their press releases, including the one linked to from Slashdot earlier today:
Note to reporters, editors and writers: VIA is written in ALL CAPS!
Ewwww! You read the ARTICLE? How could you possibly have a traditional /. kneejerk response after reading the article?
Cmon, we have a tradition to uphold here. Say it with me now:
Damn that Intel! Yay AMD! Yay Cyrix! Yay Via!
You are correct sir. There are no FANS or even people that like that computing device of yours. :)
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
Pentium 4 is a lousy chip, the pentium 3 not much better
Please define "lousy". Do you mean that it requires more clock to reach a certain level of performance (which is what many typically mean). If so, how does this make it lousy if what you're measuring is the "complete" performance and not just say "efficiency". Intel made a very concious design choice when they went the super deep pipeline high clock route. Which has more "wow", the fact that you can ramp the clock rates up quicker, or that you can get more done with the clock that you have? Isn't this similar to engines, where you have one camp that likes big cubes and massive torque vs the camp that likes high effiency and high rpms. They both have their plus's and minus's and it really depends on the application?
The only thing keeping Pentium-line procs afloat is marketing at this point.
But don't you think that Intel "plays the market". By this I mean their processors have the price/performance ratio that they currently do because the market allows them to? It would appear that Intel could certainly afford to drop the price of their chips quite considerably if they wanted to, but this would be very damaging to the bottom line in the share holders eyes for no real benefit. So Intel continues to have the price of their chips higher than anyone else, because it makes their pocket books fat. If push came to shove, they could do a LOT of damage to the clones while still being able to survive.
It wasn't on CNN, therefore it is either:
1. Not True.
2. Propoganda from the other side.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
A year and a half ago, I would've agreed with you. A year ago, I would've agreed with you. Around the release of the the socket 478 P4s with 512K L2 cache, I stopped believing.
I went to build a machine about 4 years ago. Top of the line P3 was $600 or so, so I picked up my 450mhz K6-2 for a little under $100. It wasn't faster by any stetch of the imagination, but it played games just fine coupled with the video card I could afford because of the savings. It wasn't beating Intel by any stretch, but it was cheap and reliable (that machine now resides with my parents, doing everything they want just fine).
I bought a 1ghz Athlon for about $200 or so. The 1ghz P3s cost more than twice as much, and were outperformed in nearly every respect. Those were AMDs glory days (starting there and progressing through to the Northwood P4s). AMD outperformed whatever Intel threw at them for about half as much. It was a no-brainer. The deficit increased even more wih the P4, which was only close when paired with RDRAM. There was an ever-so-brief period a little over a year ago where a lot of retail PC companies (the Compaqs and HPs of the world) were actually shipping their higher-end units with Athlons. I considered that great, because so few Joe Six-Packs knew the AMD name, and seeing that "trusted" companies (and not just screwdriver shops) used them went a good way in spreading the word about AMD
And then Intel got serious. They slashed the prices of their chips and released their 512KB L2 cache processors. I bought a 2.4Ghz P4 a couple of weeks ago for $160. The Athlon 2400+ was $130. These are two processors that would literally be neck-and-neck in almost any situation. If the Intel processor was $250, we'd definitely be talking AMD time, but it wasn't. It was $30 more, a number that could easily be made up for in any number of other areas. Plus, it was nice to forget about VIAs 4-in-1 crap (although the NForce stuff looks pretty nice). Now, I built a 2000+ for my brother about a month ago, and for stuff in that range ($80 for the proc, $70 for the NForce1 Board), AMD still rules, but I honestly hope the hammer seriously kicks ass if AMD wants to stay in this business.
I agree with you to a point, but i feel i should clarify. I have a pentium 4 and a pentium 4 Xeon at work. Both are sluggish and fail to meet my expectations consistently when I multitask heavily. However, before my wife switched to linux, her AMD with half the megahertz and half the RAM of my box at work ran considerably smoother, froze up less mid-task (not critical stopping freeze, several seconds of pause), and was over all a more pleasing computer. This may be due to the motherboard chipsets, but overall it has given me a very bad impression of the capability of the respective chips. Perhaps it is the motherboard chipsets, i know not. What I do know is that if my car, regardless of engine, cannot continually run as long as the engine is in order with fuel (or electricity), I will likely not buy another of that car.
Yes, i do think Intel plays the market. They play the market like a chump. And the market falls for it every time. I recall building my friend's box for her, and her mom was initially rather insistent upon a P4 until she found out that AMD was considerably cheaper and that the features of the P4 were not going to make enough of a difference for a box to write reports on for college. She ended up with rather than the $2000 machine that she had initially intended to buy her daughter, but a $1200 computer that surpassed the Pentium 4 she had been eyeing in every way for what she needed it for (more mhz, more ram, a few options she didnt even think of like a NIC, a modem, a cd burner, etc. all of which would have cost more than her initial 2k base price). So its not that the market doesnt care, its just that they dont know any better.
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Computers aren't quite to the point where the throwaway engineering is going to lead to market success, i hope.
This is kinda off topic but related to Intel compatibility, all the centrino branded laptops are being sold with the Intel 2100 Pro mini-pci wireless adaptor. This adaptor does not currently work on Linux. Intel has announced tentative plans to support this adaptor on Linux. The are still deciding whether or not to release it as open source or binary only. Considering the large amount of laptops being sold with the 2100 Pro adaptor, I urge anyone, to contact Intel and let them know that you would like to see an open source wireless driver for linux, as soon as possible. You can also send them an e-mail too. We don't want this to turn in to another winmodem situation.
I'll define lousy for you.
We are hiring, and for our five new people I was asked to spec out and procure some x86 "workstation" and for the money, we'd thought we'd get some intel kit and try out this newfangled hyper-threading stuff. So I ordered 5 dual Pentium IV Xeon 2.8GHz machines with 1GB RAM and 120GB hard drives. We've only fired up one so far. The poor guy who uses it is going mad. When it's idling, the thing sounds like a hoover because of the processor fans. When any load goes on the CPUs, the fans spin up and it sounds like an F15 taking off. This is supposed to be a workstation for use in an office. I call that lousy.
Stick Men
You do make a decent point, though my experience with P4 ended with my 1.7 P4 at work. It's a piece of crap. We also have several of our communal machines on other P4s and they are also terrible. Perhaps the latest and greatest P4 chips arent that bad, but if the performance is somewhere similar and the price difference is moot, i would rather support AMD than Intel. They have been more consistent in their quality in the past couple years for me than Intel, so I am more inclined to trust them. Besides. They need the money more, and if they go out of business Intel would go right back to their old shenannigans.
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This Link gives a little info from the Centaur side of the issue.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
The only VIA-cpu's I've taken a serious interest in is soldered onto their cute little EPIA-mobos. As it is soldered in - and designed to be a cool, low-power (watt) solution - I honestly could care less wether it's pincompatible with Intel, AMD or anyone else.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
If you don't need the extra cycles a P4 or Athlon can put out, you're often better off with a c3 -- they're cooler and, by virtue of that, silent.
Mechanical parts are the weak link in computer reliability.
If you're building an largish embedded device, maybe a car MP3 player or a home theater DVD player or something, you want reliability, you need a certain amount of power but not more than that, and you don't want noise.
And many people don't need the extra cycles. I use a PII/266, which is significantly less powerful than a c3, and I'm happy. Having a silent box would be nice.
May we never see th
you can't buy single Via processors anyway
I think you're mistaken
From that page:
The 667MHz VIA Cyrix III is the coolest processor on the market
and
The 600MHz VIA C3 is the coolest processor on the market
I'm confused.
What a sad day this is when a post repeating stuff from the article is modded "informative."
No, I'm not that new here.
Pentium 4 is a lousy chip, the pentium 3 not much better.
By what metric are you calling the Pentium 4 a "lousy chip"?
It's a relatively high power usage desktop processor with a heavy reliance on compilers that know about it. Maybe you dislike that *type* of processor, but it doesn't do a bad job of filling that gap. It's hardly lousy. The only real competitor I can think of is the Athlon, which is, I suppose, comparable, but not, to my knowledge, particularly better designed.
I also don't understand why you consider the PIII a worse chip than the PII. The PIII has lower power requirements, generally got better clock-for-clock performance, and introduced some nice SIMD instructions.
AMDs may run a bit hot, but their performance IMO is superior.
Obviously, this depends on the application, but generally, current P4s use more wattage and produce more heat than current Athlons but are more powerful. It's pretty much the reverse of what you're arguing.
Transmeta should make motherboards for "build yer own" types who want them.
The big draw of Crusoe is for laptops (not a particularly build-your-own area) and a few very custom projects. In general, you're better off with a C3, given that the Crusoe seems to be marketed primarily as an x86-compatible chip.
The only thing keeping Pentium-line procs afloat is marketing at this point.
I disagree. I agree that Intel charges a premium, but there are a few significant advantages to Intel systems -- you *can* get slightly more powerful systems if you really need it (granted, not that likely), and most importantly, AMD-compatible *motherboards* (not the processors themselves) have a long tradition of flakiness. The boom over the last three or so years in AMD-based systems has also seen a huge increase in the number of hardware problems. The increase in hard freezes or spontaneous reboots over that timeframe among my friends purchasing new computers is quite impressive.
May we never see th
After a bit of afterthought, I'm not sure the 386 had an integrated memory controller, but the DX denoted a 32-bit FSB in any case.
0 6. htm#Heading13
I took a quick look around the web, but was unable to find any authorative reference (eg Intel tech docs), but I did come up with the following:
http://cma.zdnet.com/book/upgraderepair/ch06/ch
Which is from the book Upgrading & Repairing PCs.
Perhaps your CPU was a clone? As far as I know, Intel never made any 386 class CPU with an integrated FPU.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
The priciple, that Intel can keep others from pin compatibility, is important. Intel has done everyting in its power to avoid direct competition. They have changed their own pinout frequently and threatened others who would follow. AMD has had longer lasting pinouts! The result is 5 or 6 types of i386 motherboards. While, thankfully, instruction set compatibility has been maitained, there is less competition in the motherboard and chip market because of this. Oh well.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I still don't understand.
Doesn't it take a surface mount soldering job to change processor chips? I had to do this to change the chipset on my lat Soyo board, I bought the new one but the mounts were different, had to resolder every chip. I didn't even see a processor. Maybe I don't know what that is. Anyway, all I wanted was to run my GEOS based C64 emulator faster, which beats KDE and any other linux GUI hands down in every respect. This might not be true of Windows 95 though. I haven't tried that yet. Does that require soldering?
I just don't get it.
As someone who has been involved in development of computer boards (not just PCs), I can say pin compatibility is not aimed for the end-user's benefit, VIA C3 is not just intended to be a "replacement CPU". Although it could be used as such, it is not the biggest benefit of pin compatibility.
The main reason why it's desirable for Via to have a pin-compatible CPU with Intel's specification is because it shortens the development time and cost of a motherboard. It's easier and cheaper for the M/B manufacturer to design the board's layout if the signals are in the same place, because a re-layout of a M/B is very expensive in both time and money. (in some cases the full development can go upwards to several hundred thousand dollars)
Additionally, there are chipsets that can support both Intel and Via CPUs, (most notably some SIS SOC designs) making it even easier to make a M/B, but this fact it's not necessarily related to having interchangeable CPUs with a socket. Having a socket is of little to no use because Intel and Via CPU's are aimed at different market segments, anyway.
Remember the whole Slot-1/Slot-A fiasco? Intel developed the PII with a slot connector, and used patents/copyrights/trademarks/whatever to prevent AMD or any other CPU manufacturer to make pin-compatible CPUs. AMD then developed the Athlon to use exactly the same connector, although with different electrical specifications and pin definition. This move was aimed to facilitate the manufacturers' development and time-to-market efforts, never to give power to the end-user.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this and everybody is easily misleaded into thinking this issue is not a important one. Maybe this shows just how few hardware development we have in the West.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
BBC ... writing `Nasa' for NASA
They're crazy.
In fact, the word for "crazy" in the Toki Pona language is nasa.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even if every slashdot reader bought a new processor to upgrade their motherboard, it would not put a dent in the decision of any large company to be compatible. More than 99.9 percent (estimate) of systems have never been upgraded to a faster processor, and never will be. With millions of systems sold every year, 30-60 thousand upgrades barely get attention. Motherboards made in "Intel" and "AMD" quantities are cheap. VIA needs a low cost place to put their chips. $1.00 cost reduction in a system will get the attention of any company making 50 thousand to a million systems per year. Four years ago I tried to buy a thousand motherboards from the largest motherboard company in the US at the time (Huntsville AL with offshore mfg - believe or not!)and the only spec they would send was a copy of a copy from a brochure they send to their "real" customers. [For your reading pleasure: At the time they said that if I live in the USA and have a computer, I have one of their motherboards! But just in case I didn't, then I had a plug-in card ISA or PCI made by them!]
I'm glad you actually got the joke. Do you have a fanless computer too? :P
--Drunk as in Beer
One of the features of the Athlon which has been toted for a long time is that AMD had licensed the very fast EV6 bus from Digital (I guess Alpha Processor, now). The result was that companies like Microway were building Alpha systems utilizing the UP1000 chipset which was really AMD Irongate based.
My question is, how much did this cost, and how much would licensing the socket 370 bus and packaging from Intel cost (assuming they were willing)?
Failing that, how difficult would it be to move to a socket 370+i (where i is enough extra pins and other foobar for the lawyers to leave VIA alone) bus when VIA tools up for their next core?
I am assuming of course that it's not just the S370 packaging that's forbidden, but the whole bus, and hence VIA will need a replacement for EPIA.
The differences are too many to name but I can guess why the one at work responds slower.
1. Other hardware (motherboard, ram, hard drive (5400 vs 7200), video card)
2. Running software (networking applications, virus software(mcafee at work vs Norton at home), etc, etc)
In all you shouldn't compare processors of 2 totally different machines that have completely different hardware and software differences.
Heck, just compare the differences of a computer you've used for 2 years and the exact same computer with a clean install of the OS. The performance differences are like night and day.
Here's an annecdote. Earlier this year, I was building two new computers from components, for a new server and a desktop Linux system. I initially set out to make low-power, totally silent systems, based around the VIA C3 CPU.
But after doing research into cooling solutions, etc., I decided I could stand a tiny bit of noise, in exchange for greater processing power (I want to run Java web sites off the server box). So I upgraded the CPU to a Pentium III. This was possible, not just because the processors are opcode compatible, but because they were both Socket 370 compatible. Just swapped them out.
I would not have purchased an Intel CPU for the server system if I had made a commitment to a different socket format. So Intel would have lost.
More importantly, as a consumer, I won big time, by having a far more flexible system, that let me make an initial investment based on one set of requirements, and then upgrade the box later, when my requirements changed.
It's a shame that Intel doesn't want to keep this. After all, the C3 processor doesn't really compete with Intel's products -- there's quite a difference in processing power, at similar clock speeds. So let VIA have the low-power low end for us SilentPC enthusiasts, and own the rest. It's basic market segmentation, and Intel knows how to do that, profitably, very well.
In all seriousness, in 3 years if things continue... falling prices, endusers not buying into the upgrade cycle, AMD and Intel undercutting each other, video cards outpacing CPU's...
3 years may be about the right time to bail from the PC (meaning intel) market and focus strictly on the exploding embedded markets...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
The most interesting bit in my mind, however, is what happens to this rogue bus license owned by S3. Recall that S3 Inc. signed a patent cross-license with Intel, then exited the graphics business, became Sonicblue, and sold off its assets to a joint venture with Via called S3 Graphics. That's why the current deal excludes S3 Graphics.
However, Sonicblue is also auctioning off its assets. That means there's going to be an Intel bus license up for grabs, possibly. However, as we wrote here, Sonicblue's legal team says the license can't be transferred without Intel's permission. That should make the auction more interesting, certainly...
Hell, most Intel CPUs are not pin compatible with other Intel CPUs.
-
In Soviet Russia, all your spam are belong to us.
However, before my wife switched to linux, her AMD with half the megahertz and half the RAM of my box at work ran considerably smoother, froze up less mid-task..., and was over all a more pleasing computer.
I'm left wondering, what happened after she switched to Linux?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I think in that case we should be ready for a new source tree which is "Via Compaitable"????
well, what the hell, its just another new direcotry..!!!
The lunatic is in my head
Oooo, water cooled computing. Definately the way to go!
I ran into this today. The brand spanking new Dell 2.4 ghz xeon server that the place I do work at bought freezes repeatedly for several seconds even though its:
1. Almost no software has been installed.
2. Has 1GB of RAM
3. Has almost no software active (except the default services)
4. Taskmanager reports only 0-5% CPU use.
5. Is on an isolated test lan that only has 1 workstation.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
it stopped freezing to begin with, making it an irrelevant comparison with a win2k box at work.
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exactly. I am running Win2k on my 1.7 Xeon and it freezes all the time. I have never had frequent freezes like this on AMDs, even my favorite box at home (duron 900) doesnt do this.
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own one; wouldnt have bought it had i known about the AGP funkiness beforehand.
i find that most AMD users dont know enough to get a strong enough power supply...thats the cause of your friends' problems methinks
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get pin compatable with AMD....AMD wpon't mind since they have a great price/performance ratio any way.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
My mp3 box uses one. They're nice chips.
I'm not sure this could work, legally.
Part of the bru-ha-ha back at the intro of the K7 was that it used "Slot-A", where "A" stood for Athlon... or Alpha. AMD licensed the Alpha bus (EV6, or was it EV4?) for use with the Athlon. At the time, there was hope that this move would bring forth Athlon motherboards that could be loaded up with an Alpha by changing CPU and BIOS chips. It was hoped to bring the Alpha much closer to affordability. Had the Alpha marketing not been fumbled so badly, this could have been a nightmare scenario for Intel.
Anyway, I have no idea what the licensing agreement between AMD and DEC (or was it Compaq, by then?) was for the bus. I've no doubt AMD can use it as much as they want, but no idea whether they can then license it to others.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Um, I have one, and occasionally I actually use it, although mainly for just playing games. Most of the times i just abuse it! :)
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....