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Intel Potentially Reverse-Engineered AMD64
icypyr0 writes "Tom Halfhill, an analyst for In-Stat/MDR claims that due to similiarities in the instruction sets of AMD64 chips and the new 64-bit extensions for Intel Xeons, it is clear that Intel reverse-engineered the AMD64. However, due to the fact that the new Xeon is not an exact copy of the AMD64's microarchitecture, Intel has not broken the law. This very tactic has actually been used by firms such as AMD in the past to catch up to Intel."
Good, because compatibility is everything.
I haven't read the article (this is /.), but i would have expected they reverse engineered, or read the documentation for AMD64 to implement their x86-64 cause it's apparently very nearly the same ISA.
Intel and AMD have a broad patent cross licensing agreement, so it's not a big deal.
Need a Catering Connection
I don't get it. If they all do it, then this is a bit of a 'none story' right?
"This very tactic has actually been used by firms such as AMD in the past to catch up to Intel."
Of course. Although don't forget cross-licensing deals as well e.g. Pentium.
The fact that Intel went to all this work simply shows that AMD made the better decision with it's architecture.
In my vocabulary "to reverse engineer" means to find out something internal, hidden and protected. The article talks about "reverse engineering AMD instruction set", which is obviously public. This is called "copying", and has nothing to do with "reverse engineering"
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
The big story here isn't that Intel has done anything "wrong", but they've done something that they haven't done in the past... something that AMD used to do when they were trailing behind Intel.
Now the shoe's on the other foot. AMD has taken one of the signs that used to say Intel was the market leader.
This is ahrdly reverse engineering. This is Intel building an ISA to a specification laid down by AMD. Just like Transmeta executing IA-32 code, or like Lindows looking like windows.
AMD didn't even have silicon before Intel started building 'yamhill', so by definition of the term, it is impossible for Intel to have reverse engineered.
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I've seen some people suggest that it was actually a "copy" of something AMD already made public, and not really a true attempt at reverse engineering. But even if it was reverse engineering, so what? Of course they haven't broken any laws! There's nothing wrong with reverse engineering. How many times has /. come out to defend reverse engineering (DeCSS, PlayFair, bleem!, Connectix's Virtual Game Station)?
If the little guys can do it, the big guys can do it, too. No double standards, please.
Tuck
Tuck's Journal.
The real crime isn't the reverse engineering. Its that both intel and AMD are still supporting the x86 architecture. x86 is like a dog that should have been put down a long time ago. I remember 10 years back looking at VAX architeture and being amazed that intel would continue without multi-purpose registers. It truly is a pain to do any assembly programming on the x86. The only excuse that intel had to continue with the x86 was that optimizing compilers weren't good enough for them to reimplement a RISC processor. The times have changed, and so should their microprocessor designs.
Half of Engineering is reverse-engineering. And it's not always a bad thing.
Yes, reverse Engineering is the norm, happens all the time, blah blah.... The real story here is that, for a change, Intel did it to AMD instead of the other way around. Or, as the article puts it, "Intel's decision, however, clearly places AMD in the role of market leader. " Maybe a tad too grandiose of a statement, but it's at least in the same ball park.
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because Intel and AMD have, and recently renewed, a share and share-alike licence for each others technologies. They do this because it would hurt them both were their chips incompatable
{cough cough cough} Itanium. And look how well that turned out.
There are options out there my friend (Power, Sparc, ARM... I happen to adore my power based macs). Its not like anyone is shoving the X86 arch. down our throat. Intel, in fact, has been trying to shove the good ship Itanic down the high end's throat and the high end told him to piss off. Face facts, technology doesn't always trump economics. Get over it (and go buy a Mac if you hate the x86 so much).
Completely irresponsible and mindless work here.
This is truly a sad, sad state of affairs when stupid, unresearched yellow journalism like this makes the front page of Slashdot. We have known for *years* about the cross licensing of patents between AMD and Intel. It's been reported ON THIS SITE.
I normally don't like to flame the editors, but this is nearly unforgivable.
Goodbye Karma.
As for Intel's processor, I haven't heard good things. I saw an article on either The Register or The Inquirer that pointed to an article in c't about the Noncona (English thanks to Google) that Noncona is in trouble. According to the article in c't, a beta tester described the performance of the chip succintly: "It sucks." The article also states that HP has decided to only use Opteron chips, so perhaps it knows this fact too. The article doesn't say why (although it speculates that it's only emulating parts of the 64 bit instruction set). The article also has some info on some other things.
All in all, after all their foot dragging, I've lost interest in Intel. I'm worried that it won't perform as well as an Opteron. I'm worried it will be a blast furnace (Opteron's aren't cool by any means, but they look only luke-warm compared to Presshot). And I have read speculation (which I believe) that Intel is going to move to an integrated memory controller (like the Opteron) for performance reasons. Let's not forget that Intel is pushing a whole new form factor (BTX) just to help controll heat (or at least that seems to be it's major contribution to the world). AMD used to look like a "me too" company to me, making knockoffs. But over time (starting with the Athlon) I've been watching them and I no longer see them as an "also ran", they seem to be the REAL innovators these days.
AMD vs. Intel:
There are tons more. I saw an article on it the other day. Intel is not on sure footing, if you ask me. Between the problems above, the trend to sub $500 computers, and just AMDs gaining reputation, Intel could be in trouble. It has recently admitted that it can't continue to use the P4 and is going to build it's future chips off of it's mobile chip because they can't keep speeding up the P4, it's not worth it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
So?
The 99.9% of people writing apps in any langauge as abstract as C or higher don't have to worry about the CPU architecture. If it compiles and runs these languages at a price/performance ratio favorable to other CPUs, then nobody sould have a problem with it.
The true runtime architecture of an X86 CPU (and most RISC chips as well) has been mostly unfathomable to humans since the Pentium Pro came out. The X86 instruction set is just a backwards-compatible abstraction that is used to logically specify what needs to be done. The chip transforms these instructions to something completely different at runtime. For example, X86 chips already do have dozens of the "multi-purpose" registers you're pining for; you just don't see them at the visible instruction set level. When you do "assembly programming" on a modern CPU, you're not much closer to the real hardware than you are writing in C.
However, that's largely irrelevant since it's not the same architecture anyway. This is reverse engineering in the most literal sense - taking a known set of responses and going backwards from it to a design that will yield the desired result. Analyzing the blueprints wouldn't be reverse engineering at all; it would actually be making a direct copy.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
Granted, it doesn't mean AMD is the "market leader" (normally measured in $$$), nor even the overall technology leader, but being copied by Intel sure bolsters AMD's image.
There's a rather large difference between having a set of programmer's manuals and having the transistor-level blurprints of the logic implementation.
And if you did have the transistor level blueprints of the logic implementation, what exactly would you be reverse engineering?