AMD is having its day

Re:AMD is having its day by roenxi on Saturday November 02, 2019 @08:31PM (#21431149)

Ease of entry into the market is much more important than the present market structure. An underdog can become the market leader in a year or two [0]. The issue with Intel/AMD is that there are only something like 4 legal entities out of >7 billion legal entities on earth who are licensed to produce x86 chips. 4 is better than 1, but it is still a low number.

It is nearly impossible to maintain an oligopoly in a market that is easy to enter and questions of underdog/overdog become irrelevant. All companies have to offer a reasonable (value/$) proposition to customers of they go broke.

[0] Poor Nokia - http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Screen-Shot...

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Re:AMD is having its day by wincy on Saturday November 02, 2019 @10:10PM (#21431579)

Is there a time in the future that x86 related patents will expire?

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Re:AMD is having its day by Dylan16807 on Sunday November 03, 2019 @12:54AM (#21432270)

Sure! For actual x86, they already have. You can make a perfectly good 32-bit chip with SSE2.

The patents on the core of x86_64 will expire in a couple years. Even if you can't have the more recent vector instructions, that's pretty good for a lot of use cases.

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Re:AMD is having its day by nazgulnarsil on Sunday November 03, 2019 @01:00AM (#21432290)

each of those 4 entities has whole teams devoted to building up the warchest of patents + colluding on standards to keep the balls in the air indefinitely.

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