Re:Watch out AMD: Intel Arc A580 could be the next great aff...
by tibbydudeza on Saturday August 05, 2023 @12:47PM
(#37013873)
AMD only got one for the 286 because IBM wanted a second source supply for their IBM PC's and things got murky when the i386 came around and AMD needed to compete.
There were some copying and I think they settled with AMD licensing the Intel FSB for $$$ (they switched to DEC Alpha bus protocol when the AMD Athlon 64 bit era came around).
With the AMD 64 they licensed it back to Intel when it became clear that Itanuim was dead as it was so slow and Microsoft forced Intel's hand by releasing a version for Windows Server.
The market is big enough for both.
Re:Watch out AMD: Intel Arc A580 could be the next great aff...
by SAI_Peregrinus on Saturday August 05, 2023 @01:29PM
(#37014376)
> clear
Yep, but they're both willing to use the patents to keep other entrants out.
Yes. There's no requirement to sell licenses to patents in general. Sometimes (not always) if a patent is included by a government in a standard that government will require the owning company to license it on "Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory" terms (FRAND). Most patents, including the x86, x86_64, and various extension patents are not required to be licensed under FRAND terms.
AMD and Intel have a mutual licensing agreement. When Intel patents a new extension, they license it to AMD. Likewise when AMD patents a new extension, the license it to Intel. That's why Intel CPUs use the AMD x86_64 instruction set, AMD CPUs use the Intel AVX 512 vector instructions, etc.