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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."
It's the end of the x86 dominance. People will just look harder to find alternatives.
Nullius in verba
So, surely this is a case of mutually assured destruction for both isn't?
And the answer is... powerPC! But only if someone takes an interest in working on the chip to lower power consumption and heat output. My dual G5 runs great but the sucker sounds like a jet engine taking off when it starts doing something computationally intensive.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Intel and AMD like to squabble about licensing every few years. Probably in an attempt to broker a deal that is even more favorable than the last. They usually spend some time posturing in court, bare their claws a little, then settle with a new cross-licensing agreement. If Intel gets too pushy, the feds start staring at them REALLY hard. Which tends to make Intel fall in line.
Strictly speaking, Intel's argument is pointless. Yes, their deal is with AMD. But AMD's foundry only manufactures the chips, it does not design them. (Unless I somehow misunderstood their fabless plan.) Since the fab creates the chips on behalf of AMD, the licensing is not violated.
That's my 2 cents worth, anyway. I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt one would make many more comments without viewing the legalese between the two companies.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... stupid intellectual property bullshit.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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."
At stake is money and corporate posturing.
This is just another day of corporate King Of The Hill.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Intel will definitely work this out. They're almost forced to license x86 to prevent being labeled a monopoly. Many believe the only reason they licensed it in the first place was to prevent legal action by the justice department. With a competitor making similar chips it's hard to claim they strong-arm computer manufacturers into using their products.
Developers: We can use your help.
If Intel becomes the exclusive provider of x86 chips, they'll be smacked by the government with anti-trust litigation (Note: I did not say WHICH government, my fellow silly Americans). It was the same with Apple being the company Microsoft pointed to when it was hit with anti-trust. Intel is simply hoping that AMD is too fearful to engage in litigation, or risk folding the business, simply to expose Intel to government action -- they are betting that AMD simply accepts whatever monthly tribute is required by Intel, thus assuring it's continued irrelevance without being wholly dismissed out of the market. If AMD still had its balls, they'd call the bluff and tell Intel to go to hell -- because Intel needs AMD a lot more than they're letting on.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
First of all, AMDs foundry probably is considered to have inherited the licence so I dont know if Intels claims really hold up.
Its been a long time since the chip architecture and schematic of AMDs chips have been directly based on Intels, if they ever have been. The only thing they share is the instruction set. Instruction sets are basically a language or communication protocol and these should not be copyrightable, just as someone could not copyright HTML, IM protocols or English. Only an implementation of software of these can be copyrighted not the language itself.
In my opinion, AMD does not need any licence to implement the ISA in the first place, just as a licence is not required to implement an SQL server or a computer language. Languages are simply not copywritable.
Starting over has been tried at least two ways I know of... Itanium and transmeta. Both have failed miserably. Care to bet on what would happen if some other one tried to come out?
with FUD
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
The tiny problem with Dubai is its money isn't made in oil, but in banking and tourism. One good indicator of how fucked its economy is, is that they're passing a law banning journalistic discussion of the economy.
And all the new building projects are being shelved as well.
http://www.kippreport.com/kipp/2009/01/21/what-freedom-of-speech/
Dubai is sinking like a rock lately. Overpriced real estate, overpriced living, with nothing of substance behind it.
http://smashingtelly.com/2009/02/15/bye-bye-dubai/
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I wish Slashdotters would stop with the incessant "x86 sucks" mantra. You're all fools.
There's plenty of crufty old instructions in the x86 ISA; no modern compilers generate them though, so no one cares that they're there. They take up a couple pages in the ISA manual I guess. The die area it takes to implement them is totally, completely insignificant. They're either in microcode (along with a bunch of other really useful instructions) or the hardware already exists for some other reason.
There's plenty of crufty segmentation and weird ways of laying out memory and whatnot; no modern OS uses that though, so no one cares that it's there. And again with the ISA manuals and some transistors. And there's plenty of modern paging and flat memory models and whatnot too.
AMD and Intel both know how to make good, fast, and (relatively) small hardware to decode variable-length x86 instructions. Yes, of course an x86 decoder is bigger (i.e. more expensive, more difficult to implement, etc.) than a RISC fixed-length decoder, but again, no one cares because we already know how to do it fast enough and cheap enough. Check out an x86 die photo sometime; most of it is cache. Probably about 1/50th is decoder.
And CISC-style+variable-length instructions get you a smaller code footprint and thus better instruction cache utilization vs. what you'd get with a fixed-length instruction stream. Examples: common ops get shorter instructions, there are more flexible addressing modes, more flexible sources/dests within a single instruction, you get one x86 instruction (no more than 15 bytes) to do what would take multiple RISC-style instructions (probably more than 15 bytes).
Sure there's the crufty x87 floating point stack. But there's also the shiny new SSE/SSE2/SSE3/whatever instructions, and modern compilers can exclusively use SSE/SSE2 to do the exact same thing (-mfpmath=sse does it in gcc). And again, die area for x87 FP stuff isn't a big deal since a lot of the hardware is shared with SSE.
ISA extensions have been added to cover all the newfangled SIMD stuff and virtualization you can want. AMD64 covers 64-bit stuff. And 64-bit stuff gives you extra registers too (8 extra integer, 8 extra SSE for a total of 16 each), which is great and a nod to the large number of registers that RISC machines give you.
In short, what the hell is everyone bitching about?
x86 has been a RISC design for a long time now. It just translates in hardware from x86 to the internal RISC engine's language. So it's getting all of those wondrous benefits already.
In fact, an unexpected side effect of this is nice instruction set compression. With RISC you have to issue several ops to do what one x86 op could accomplish. Each instruction takes bandwidth that the x86 has saved. Therefore the x86 actually gets better performance.
I still say ARM is in a position to dominate as a platform. Despite all Intel has done it just can't even come close on energy efficiency.
Soon the general purpose computer will leave the desk and make its way into our pockets. Very few people will need or even want a full sized computer. Just like now most people now choose laptops over desktops. Then laptops to netbooks. And in the not too distant future, cell phones will do everything most people would want to do short of writing complex software, full length novels, or anything else requiring lots of typing. Even then maybe that's possible, too. But we're going to get there sooner on ARM than x86.
Yes, VIA is still around, and they make some decent little 64-bit x86 processors that sell under the name Nano.
The Nano processor actually does a pretty good job of holding its own against the Atom; edging ahead in almost every area, except for power consumption.