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Intel Threatens To Revoke AMD's x86 License
theraindog writes "AMD's former manufacturing division opened for business last week as GlobalFoundries, but the spin-off may run afoul of AMD's 2001 cross-licensing agreement with Intel. Indeed, Intel has formally accused AMD of violating the agreement, and threatened to terminate the company's licenses in 60 days if a resolution is not found. Intel contends that GlobalFoundries is not a subsidiary of AMD, and thus is not covered by the licensing agreement. AMD has fired back, insisting that it has done nothing wrong, and that Intel's threat constitutes a violation of the deal. At stake is not only AMD's ability to build processors that use Intel's x86 technology, but also Intel's ability to use AMD's x86-64 tech in its CPUs."
Maybe I'm missing something, but how can the x86 architecture itself be subject to copyright? Isn't the protected property not the publicly documented instruction set, but the implementation thereof?
I believe it's not the core x86 instructions, but rather all the various MMX and SSE extensions that have been tacked on in the past 10-15 years. And as mentioned in the summary, AMD's x64 extensions are at stake, too.
This guy's the limit!
Since x86_64 is a superset of x86, would this mean AMD couldn't even sell x86_64 based chips either?
Funny thing is that AMD licensed/agreed to share their x86_64 arch back to Intel.
So essentially it's:
"I'll let you play with mine if I can play with yours."
Now a 3rd party (loosely affiliated with AMD) is playing with Intel's x86, and that wasn't part of the agreement.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
It IS just a matter of passing a different CPU flag. MS discontinued the MIPS, PPC, and Alpha versions because there was not only no demand for it, but the few people who bought it tied up lots of MS customer service time bitching that X86 programs didn't run on MIPs/PPC/Alpha.
Windows is no more married to X86 than Linux or OS X. In fact, I can tell you where to get a fairly modern Windows Kernel running on a PPC chip in pretty much any electronics store: The XBox 360.
The NT kernel was designed from the ground up to be portable. The only real reason it's currently only supporting X86 is because that's the only place there's any sort of demand. If X86 dies (And it won't. AMD and Intel both have lots to lose, though AMD more than Intel here), Microsoft will port over to PPC (Or whatever), throw on an emulation layer, and probably take the opportunity to break a whole bunch of crappy stuff in Windows that's maintained simply for backwards compatibility.
Agree, ARM has been gaining grounds due to it's low (as none) power consumption when idle. So long backward compatibility tough.
No, their not. Abusing a monopoly position is.
I can certainly patent sexwidget and have a perfectly legal monopoly as the only company in the world producing them. Only if I try to force people to do other things not directly related to my sexwidget in order to get access to them is it considered abusing my monopoly status. In other words, if I try to force retailers to purchase other products like sexfoo & sexbar as a requirement for being able to sell sexwidgets, I'm abusing my monopoly.
Not all virtualization requires hardware extensions. In fact, VMware was doing it long before Intel and AMD added virtualization support to their processors. VMware pulled this off by doing dynamic translation, where the virtual machine monitor would transparently rewrite native x86 into virtualized x86 code. For the most part this was just doing a straight copy, and perhaps rewriting some jump addresses. Privileged code that runs in the OS kernel had to be rewritten as something equivalent that would run fine in an unprivileged process.
This really isn't so different from running .NET or Java code. The code starts out compiled to a virtual instruction set, and the JIT compiler translates this on the fly to something that can run natively on the CPU.
This is also how Rosetta worked in Mac OS X to run PPC apps on an x86 processor. XBox 360 does a similar thing to run old XBox games, since the 360 uses a PPC processor but the old XBox was x86.
Sure, you take a performance hit in doing this, but the apps generally get rewritten to run natively eventually, and the ones that don't end up being old enough that they run faster on modern hardware even with the extra translation layer.
Intel wasn't actually convicted of abusing its monopoly status. It wasn't a monopoly. And it wasn't convicted.
It settled with an economic commission (none of these things are courts) and at that point decided it was cheaper to pay the fine (less than $50 million; about an hour's pay to Intel) than to fight it in a court.
In the settlement Intel admits no wrongdoing, and the Japanese assert none.
I'd like to see a chip that can run in a x86 'translated' mode and a 'native' RISC mode, much like was done with 32bit/64 bit.
Already ready to use. The Transmeta Crusoe processor does this on the fly. Of course, now they're owned (or is that pwned?) by Novafora so your guess is as good as mine whether this will survive.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
You are apparently ignorant of history.
You apparently can't even be bothered to read the wikipedia entry on AMD.
Intel licensed x86 to AMD originally because Intel was unable to keep up with demand.
AMD was a second source for the 8086 and 8088 because IBM demanded two sources, not because Intel couldn't make enough.
AMD refused to stop making x86's, and sued Intel to keep the right to do so. AMD actually LOST that case,
AMD was the one who challenged the x86 license cancellation and won the case in arbitration, and after numerous appeals it was upheld b the California Supreme Court.
They renewed the license in 2001. AMD has now breached the license.
Given that the licensing agreement isn't public, your analysis is clearly pulled straight from your rectum.
Intel has no responsibility to keep AMD in business.
The amusing thing about cross licensing agreements is that they cross. You can't really cancel half a contract. If Intel forces AMD out of the x86 CPU market... then Intel is out of it too, unless they intend to use something other than EMT64, which is a licensed implementation of AMD's proprietary AMD64.
Natural law is against being a failure like AMD.
Oh, I see. Your an Intel fanboy. That explains it.
who moderated this fool up so high?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.