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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?
This has been brewing for years. AMD with it's anti-competitive lawsuit against Intel, and now this. AMD's suit is mostly won, but Intels new suit could really make things interesting.
AMD's next line of Phenom II are coming out soon and AMD doing better in terms of sales. Intels feeling the pinch from Netbook sales pulling out the rug from the I7's anticipated sales. The market is changing and it favors AMD in the terms that people are spending less. Intel has a lot more to loose then AMD and that's why this is going to be so good.
If Intel wins the consumer will lose, if AMD holds its ground Intel will suffer a large drop in sales and the giant of the company will fall. Any sort of drop in sales from Intel and it will have to make major cutbacks and Intel will loose all sorts of momentum just to save it's cash. The middle ground is what we all will hope for but even that could really hurt the Intel giant.
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
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?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
... 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.
New hotness = Lawyers on retainer!
I for one, will miss the Megahertz Myth race.. But hey, it might go crazy when AMD has a GPU as the Vector CPU in the computer, and Intel has to sell a 63-bit processor.
I guess it will be exciting to watch new developments again.. Seems they've gotten a little to comfortable with each others positions lately..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Long live StrongSparcPC_x64! Poor Microsoft, how on earth would they sell Windows 7?
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
...but isn't that generally what a company that is in majority controlled by another company called?
Also, would AMD really have been so short-sighted as to sign a cross-licensing agreement with Intel that wouldn't allow AMD to contract an unlicensed third party to fabricate AMD's designs under AMD's licenses as an agent of AMD?
Not trying to sound like a troll here, but x86 should have been retired decades ago. It designed in a totally different era and was never intended to scale well and its been a series of hacks to get it to do so. ( it was impossible to predict where we were going back then, the cpu industry was far too immature )
Sure, they have done wonders keeping it moving, but its long since time to start over with a clean architecture.
My preference would be MIPS or SPARC inspired, but thats just me, either way its time to move on/up.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
At one level, wouldn't it have been a smarter, lower-litigation-cost approach if AMD had spun off their NON-FOUNDRY (design) operations but kept all the x86 rights under the same house as the foundry? (if the design company wants to make x86 parts with other foundries, as they have done previously if I'm correct, they simply designate it as "design contracting" FOR the Foundry Company which holds the x86 rights (profit stream going to AMD, but that's a contract detail irrelevant to x86 licence).
At another level, what IF Intel ends AMD's x86 licence?
Isn't the point of the licence in the first place that AMD also has their own signifigant patents they could sue Intel for violating? I just don't see the logic in this, especially given that Intel seems to be doing GREAT compared to AMD, and AMD's continued existence gives Intel an anti-monopoly defense as long as they continue to compete in the x86 market.
At another level, this certainly seems big enough an issue to bring up the legitimacy of patent monopolies with regards to anti-trust law. US law doesn't generally hold (business) monopolies to be illegal per se, but I believe EU law *DOES*, and if Intel would gain a mainstream CPU monopoly by kicking AMD out of the x86 business, there would be repurcussions. If there was no x86 competition (VIA of course "exists"), the chances of EU nullifying x86 patents (or establishing "open" standardized licencing ala MP3) would seem to rise dramatically, which seems counter to Intel's interests.
Hmm, I wonder if the reason for this is Intel is scared of Globalfoundaries? If I'm not mistaken, the folks who bought the foundry from AMD are the same folks who are building in Dubai. You know the place where money flows like water and they're willing to waste billions to build custom islands? If that's the case, it is possible that AMD could be ramping up their production and process dramatically which would negate any gains Intel has. AMD also seems to have a more market friendly history with other companies than Intel has. Perhaps this is Intel's attempt to gain a monopoly before their ship sinks?
I personally think that's a damn stupid threat for Intel to make. AMD is arguably the only company that is preventing Intel from being broken up as a monopoly... you don't threaten to bury your only competition when you're nearly a monopoly. The various governments around the world aren't appreciative of that type of behavior. Unless they would like to be broken into dozens of pieces.
Shadus
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.
This is probably just high stakes gambling. AMD has little to lose. (I say that as an AMD share holder looking at my $2.49 stock price.) Intel has more to lose if they have to redo the 64Bit code. According to the reading, if Intel wins, they get rid of AMD, and become a defacto monopoly having to face US and EU anti-trust regulators. If AMD wins, they get to go along as before and Intel can't sell 64-bit CPUs that people want.
Basically I bet AMD's lawyers are saying "Go ahead make my day." Given the above even if Intel wins in court, they lose.
Think Deeply.
But the big draw of windows is the inertia of 1,000,000 one-off apps that businesses have written. Microsoft would be scared of people moving to another architecture just because if people were making a (painful) switch anyway, they might look at the alternatives.
If you wrote the damn app, then learn to recompile it and move on to whatever/whomever is going to be pimping procs next month or next year. If you're that worried about your legacy apps, then learn to use virtualization.
Moores law didn't get to be a "law" by playing nice and waiting around. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of my way.
Inertia is as fast and powerful as the people behind it. Adapt or die. It's that simple.
If I recall correctly, both Intel and AMD have licensed Alpha technology from DEC-I-mean-Compaq-I-mean-HP. Maybe they could get together with a 64-bit architecture that actually works well.
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.
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?
Looks like we either choose ARM or PowerPC to replace X86 technology and run X86 programs via emulation.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Have you ever used an Itanium box?
Jeez, what an awful piece of cr*p. Sound of a vaccum cleaner, performance slower than an equivalent x86, Mhz for Mhz (timeframe: 2000/1). Well maybe no in benchmarks, but if you had a box, side by side, both running Whistler, you couldn't tell the difference.
I had an early pre-release Intel box (well, I had several) plus pre-release Visual Studio and compilers. I ported a 2,000,000 line C++ CAD app from 32 bit MFC to 64 bit MFC. We did the port, but the box did not sing. It was horrible.
5 years earlier I'd used Sun's Windows emulation environment running Windows apps on Sparcstation pizza boxes. That was better.
Itanium is much more of a dead platform than x86.
I don't know how expandable SPARC is, in terms of future bandwidth, but if its available its a reasonable legacy bet, given Sun have the emulator software.
Real shame they dropped Alpha. That was a good platform. Ahread of its time. We had one in our office early nineties, running Digital UX. Sometime in 90-94. That thing was fast, compared to the competition.
ARM would be excellent though, I'd love that to happen. Same platform for desktop, mobile, embedded, low power, high performance. All we need is multi-core (sorry, haven't followed it closely enough to know if that is the horizon).
I've only used 2 machines in my life that have sounded like vaccuum cleaners:
1) Motorola Exorciser, 6809 development system with 8" floppies
2) Intel development Itanium box (several of).
Both were [polite]not very good[/polite].
The NEC V20 was an 8088 replacement, but it really was an 80186 processor with an 8088 pin-out. The V30 was the 8086 version. Having come to market some 8 years after the 8088/8086, they incorporated design improvements and new instructions, but were generally about 30% faster. They were great for spreadsheets but sucked with games--games of that era utilized published timings for instructions. "Turbo" XTs didn't affect them too much since every instruction that took x amount of time on a 4.77MHz 8088 took x/2 time on a 9.54MHz 8088. On a V20/V30, games would seem to speed up or slow down based on what instruction was run...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
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.
The ARM netbooks and embedded devices are coming and there's nothing Microsoft or Intel can do about it except adapt and compete. The time when you could defeat a good technology with an evangelist is long gone since the public now knows evangelists are just shills for hire. The day a MS rep could derail a Linux deployment with a sneer has passed. Sorry Enderle, your day is done.
Intel will choose to compete and they have a good start because they started years ago. As the Atom die shrinks and gains SOC capabilities, its power requirements will come down. Maybe not to ARM levels, but to an acceptable level faster than ARM can bring their performance up to acceptable levels for a good user experience. Microsoft will choose to use the tools they have, and fail to adapt. That's what they do. They can't grasp a market that's abandoned the need for them. It's alien to their corporate culture. After they've failed in the market they'll buy an ARM OS vendor and try, but that's five years hence. and they'll buy five of them badly and integrate them poorly and we'll laugh at their ineptitude here.
Ultimately Intel will win this one but there will be some interesting side stories and products between now and then. Microsoft will lose because they choose not to port to the interesting new platform Linux runs on already, and so when the channels merge again they will have lost share. By then low power devices might be most of the share, at least for end user devices.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Intel can shut down AMD's ability to use the X86 technology without giving up the AMD-64 technology if they can show that AMD defaulted on the agreement.
AMD can use the X86 technology and prevent Intel from using the AMD-64 technology if they prevail.
A court is going to have to measure this. The smart money is on a settlement but barring that Intel will win.
Let us meet here again in seven years, when the matter is settled.
Help stamp out iliturcy.