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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."
...Isn't it true that they left out the NX (no-execute?) bit, thus causing some compatibility issues?
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I have not read the license but maybe deliberately breaking the compatibility may not be an option, and god forbid having your "innovations" stymied. [/sarcasm]
Help fight continental drift.
Barring that, Intel could have simply browsed to AMD's web page and downloaded it themselves.
In Slashdot Utopia we could mark this article as "-1, Yellow Journalism".
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
It looks like Intel might be pulling the same trick as MS did on Java. By not implementing two instructions (LAHF and SAHF) might be trying to break compatibility ever so slightly. The question is whether they'll be able to fragment the market as well as Microsoft did.
I suspect that they won't be able to, as compatibility and optimization lies a mere recompile away. However, if they were going to be 100% binary compatible, the results would be most interesting. Just imagine the carnage from head-to-head competition between Intel and AMD. While they have competed in the past, they have always had slightly different offerings. Their different feature sets were needed by different people. If these were identical, then AMD and Intel would be on the same battleground with the same featureset.
It would be an interesting battle indeed. AMD's low cost and efficiency (and overclockability) versus Intel's brute-force and high-speed (and marketing). I suppose we'll have to wait for the next round for anything along those lines though.
We had several years of "DOStel".
Remember when 8086's and 80286's were made by everybody from Harris to NEC? DOS was the standard, and LIM 4 was the memory overlay spec. You could USE something goofy like NEC's 20MHz 8086 clone - when the Intel part topped off shy of 8 Mhz, and the 286 ran at 12MHz!
The whole kit was nearly "off-the-shelf", except for the BIOS. This was what Compaq "clean-room" reverse engineered with such care.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes, but intel needs something to differentiate the Xeon from the itanic i.e. they can claim you need to buy an intanic to get this high-tech, innovative intel security feature. Many corporates still don't buy AMD because there hasn't been big name backing until now. intel hopes that it can still market its way past some peoples' ignorance.
Stick Men
While working at Intel in 2000-2001 it was well known that there was a "finders fee" of $5,000 for each 'hammer' you could provide the company with. In fact there was even a spooky looking site (complete with spy vs spy logo) on our intranet listing what all the finders fees were for various 'items' under development by our competitors.
needless to say I was a little surprised when I saw this...but not to surprised.
Two words: backwards compatibility. Nobody wants a processor that is not backwards compatible with current software, and nobody except OS programmers really cares what's inside the chip. If there was an actual demand for a better architecture, people would have switched to Alpha or PPC a long time ago.
I think it's clear to everyone this isn't reverse engineering. They are copying the instruction set, which in most peoples opinion, is no sin. It's of mutual benefit if the instruction sets are compatible, and there is a cross-licensing agreement in place between the two companies to ensure this.
What I think is that Intel is now saying, "Oh crap, we missed 2 instructions!" Now do they quickly add them in to maintain the compatibility, or create this wiered instruction set that is always going to be known as "Intel's Mostly Compatible AMD64 Instruction Set". I would like to see them add the 2 instructions in, just to make it easier for software developers.