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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...

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