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A comment on Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed. Parent comment

Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by unethical_ban on Thursday August 23, 2018 @12:53PM (#17828753)
I just want to throw it out there that it might be impossible for AMD to actually go out of business. They're Intel's only major x86 competitor, IIRC their x86 license is non-transferrable, and no way Intel would be permitted in the USA to have an actual monopoly on x86 production.

I kick myself for not buying AMD at $2 (or buying a LOT more at $5).

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Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by ValentineC on Thursday August 23, 2018 @01:32PM (#17829075)
> They're Intel's only major x86 competitor, IIRC their x86 license is non-transferrable, and no way Intel would be permitted in the USA to have an actual monopoly on x86 production.

I just looked this up, and it seems to boil down to the patent cross-licensing agreement between Intel, which developed the x86 architecture, and AMD, which developed the 64-bit instruction set. I don't think there's a unilateral "non-transferable license" per se — and they're free to enter into a new agreement if either party does get acquired.

This Reddit thread seems pretty good at explaining it in much more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/3b0ytk/discussion...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by AsyncAwait on Thursday August 23, 2018 @01:01PM (#17828827)
> I just want to throw it out there that it might be impossible for AMD to actually go out of business.

Even if you buy this, (I don't), there's no point for them to stay in business with absolutely non-competitive products. The remarkable thing is that thanks to Zen that did not happen and Intel actually feels some heat for the first time in years.

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