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According to this article, those license terms were mutual, and Intel has already been selling its Atom IP to Rockchip and others. http://www.extremetech.com/c

by mtgx 11y ago

According to this article, those license terms were mutual, and Intel has already been selling its Atom IP to Rockchip and others. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-new-293-million-joint-venture-to-build-servers-for-the-chinese-market http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-ne... Also, another thing that everyone points out when there's a discussion about AMD being acquired, is that "Intel wouldn't allow it" because of that clause in the license agreement. I think that argument makes no sense. The only reason Intel hasn't completely crushed AMD so far (which it could've done by keeping prices low until it eliminated AMD) in the market, is because it doesn't want to remain a monopoly in the PC market. You think Google has it bad in the EU right now? It would be far worse for Intel (which already got fined $1.5 billion in the EU for anti-competitive practices against AMD). The second reason why it doesn't make sense is that AMD owns the 64-bit ISA rights. I'm guessing Intel would still need that to operate in all markets except IoT... So to end that argument once and for all - of course Intel would allow AMD to be acquired, one way or another. Worst case scenario, whoever acquires AMD would have to pay slightly higher royalties to Intel for the next 5 years. Getting back on point, as the ExtremeTech post mentions, it's likely this is only IP that AMD alone owns anyway.

tcoppi 11y ago
I'm not sure anymore that EMT64 actually relies on any AMD IP, if articles are correct and the Intel-AMD cross-licensing agreement expired last year. Intel has basically had a de-facto monopoly on the PC and server space for the past 5+ years so I don't really buy that argument either. The buyout pressure was real enough when AMD was splitting into AMD + GloFo that Abu Dhabi couldn't buy a controlling stake in AMD, much to their chagrin. That might be null now if there really is no more agreement, in which case I would be surprised if there was NOT a buyout offer in the next few years. Edit: Also, as far as I can see from googling, the Rockchip deal doesn't actually exchange any IP, it simply allows them to customize existing Atom cores into SoCs.
phkahler 11y ago
>> The second reason why it doesn't make sense is that AMD owns the 64-bit ISA rights. I'm guessing Intel would still need that to operate in all markets except IoT... It would be interesting to see a chip that dropped support for the legacy instruction sets. If a server is running software fully built as 64bit, how much IP could be dropped from the underlying design? There may also be a bit of performance on the table for doing that as well, but probably not much. Certainly no significant die area savings these days.
- dfox 11y ago
  The long mode 64b instruction set is similar enough to normal 16/32b i386 ISA that droping the 16/32b part will make no significant difference both in terms of IP and hardware resources. On similar note, first AMD's 64b chips had some intentional limitations in backward compatibility with i386 ISA (that's why Microsoft says that it is not possible to run 16b programs on 64b windows due to hardware limitations), but newer chips do not have these limitations, probably because any cost savings are insignificant (which given the fact that most of the die area today are caches and not logic makes perfect sense).

by mtgx 11y ago

tcoppi 11y ago

I'm not sure anymore that EMT64 actually relies on any AMD IP, if articles are correct and the Intel-AMD cross-licensing agreement expired last year. Intel has basically had a de-facto monopoly on the PC and server space for the past 5+ years so I don't really buy that argument either. The buyout pressure was real enough when AMD was splitting into AMD + GloFo that Abu Dhabi couldn't buy a controlling stake in AMD, much to their chagrin. That might be null now if there really is no more agreement, in which case I would be surprised if there was NOT a buyout offer in the next few years. Edit: Also, as far as I can see from googling, the Rockchip deal doesn't actually exchange any IP, it simply allows them to customize existing Atom cores into SoCs.

phkahler 11y ago

>> The second reason why it doesn't make sense is that AMD owns the 64-bit ISA rights. I'm guessing Intel would still need that to operate in all markets except IoT... It would be interesting to see a chip that dropped support for the legacy instruction sets. If a server is running software fully built as 64bit, how much IP could be dropped from the underlying design? There may also be a bit of performance on the table for doing that as well, but probably not much. Certainly no significant die area savings these days.

dfox 11y ago
The long mode 64b instruction set is similar enough to normal 16/32b i386 ISA that droping the 16/32b part will make no significant difference both in terms of IP and hardware resources. On similar note, first AMD's 64b chips had some intentional limitations in backward compatibility with i386 ISA (that's why Microsoft says that it is not possible to run 16b programs on 64b windows due to hardware limitations), but newer chips do not have these limitations, probably because any cost savings are insignificant (which given the fact that most of the die area today are caches and not logic makes perfect sense).