Intel Threatens To Revoke AMD's x86 License 476
theraindog writes "AMD's former manufacturing division opened for business last week as GlobalFoundries, but the spin-off may run afoul of AMD's 2001 cross-licensing agreement with Intel. Indeed, Intel has formally accused AMD of violating the agreement, and threatened to terminate the company's licenses in 60 days if a resolution is not found. Intel contends that GlobalFoundries is not a subsidiary of AMD, and thus is not covered by the licensing agreement. AMD has fired back, insisting that it has done nothing wrong, and that Intel's threat constitutes a violation of the deal. At stake is not only AMD's ability to build processors that use Intel's x86 technology, but also Intel's ability to use AMD's x86-64 tech in its CPUs."
Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel and AMD like to squabble about licensing every few years. Probably in an attempt to broker a deal that is even more favorable than the last. They usually spend some time posturing in court, bare their claws a little, then settle with a new cross-licensing agreement. If Intel gets too pushy, the feds start staring at them REALLY hard. Which tends to make Intel fall in line.
Strictly speaking, Intel's argument is pointless. Yes, their deal is with AMD. But AMD's foundry only manufactures the chips, it does not design them. (Unless I somehow misunderstood their fabless plan.) Since the fab creates the chips on behalf of AMD, the licensing is not violated.
That's my 2 cents worth, anyway. I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt one would make many more comments without viewing the legalese between the two companies.
Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Insightful)
Strictly speaking, Intel's argument is pointless. Yes, their deal is with AMD. But AMD's foundry only manufactures the chips, it does not design them. (Unless I somehow misunderstood their fabless plan.) Since the fab creates the chips on behalf of AMD, the licensing is not violated.
It may not be that easy. The Intel/AMD license agreement, for all its notoriety, is completely confidential and thus nobody knows exactly what is in it except for a small number of people at both companies. Despite that, it has long been suspected that part of the agreement is that AMD would not manufacture more than a certain % of its chips at a 3rd party fab, which FoundryCo -- wait, it's GlobalFoundries now, slightly less stupid name -- would almost certainly count as once fully spun off.
Strictly speaking, though, nobody outside the upper echelons knows. The only thing I'm 100% certain of is that AMD thought about the cross-licensing agreement when they came up with the idea for spinning off the fabs, and would not have done it if they thought it would cost them their license. But of course companies can differ in their self-serving legal reasoning, and who knows maybe they knew they were taking a chance and felt that the global anti-trust inquiries and the threat of losing AMD64 licensing would keep Intel playing ball?
Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Insightful)
If Intel gets too pushy, the feds start staring at them REALLY hard. Which tends to make Intel fall in line.
One remedy used in the past for monopolies is to take it's patents and trade secrets and place them in the public domain. Even if Intel were to win a complete victory, they could end up losing it all.
Fuzzy on x86 IP (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fuzzy on x86 IP (Score:5, Informative)
I believe it's not the core x86 instructions, but rather all the various MMX and SSE extensions that have been tacked on in the past 10-15 years. And as mentioned in the summary, AMD's x64 extensions are at stake, too.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not copyright. Patents. [cnet.com].
In other words, Intel claims patents over much of the technology that makes an x86 an x86, and AMD agreed (back in 2001--the patent cross-licensing agreement that's in dispute in this issue). AMD could hardly walk away from the agreement now* and continue to manufacture x86-descended CPUs--their previous acceptance of the patents would be evidence against them in Intel's inevitable patent infringement suit.
No, I Am Not A Lawyer. And I'm sure it's nuanced much more finely than this. B
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding is that if you wanted to make a 286 clone designed from scratch, you would probably be in the clear. OTOH, if you want modern extensions like MMX, or even SSE/AMD64, then you need a license for the more modern variations. That said, the whole field is deeply complicated and unclear. Some part
More... (Score:3, Insightful)
... stupid intellectual property bullshit.
What's really at stake (Score:3, Insightful)
At stake is not only AMD's ability to build processors that use Intel's x86 technology, but also Intel's ability to use AMD's x86-64 tech in its CPUs."
At stake is money and corporate posturing.
This is just another day of corporate King Of The Hill.
Intel will license it (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel will definitely work this out. They're almost forced to license x86 to prevent being labeled a monopoly. Many believe the only reason they licensed it in the first place was to prevent legal action by the justice department. With a competitor making similar chips it's hard to claim they strong-arm computer manufacturers into using their products.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The real reason for the licensing had nothing to do with the Judicial system.
In order to bid on certain government/DOD contracts you are required to have a second source for most items. This to prevent all of the usual issues you normally get when dealing with a single source, namely they go out of business and you can't find them any more.
By allowing AMD to license and manufacture, Intel was able to bid on more government contracts. This all occurred back in the 80's prior to Intel dominating the CPU fie
Re:Intel will license it (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't so much that Intel couldn't keep up with demand, more that IBM's policy required that a second source be available just in case they couldn't.
No, there is no law against being a monopoly. There are laws against being an abusive monopoly however. Intel has been convicted of abusing it's monopoly status in Japan, has at least been accused of doing so in the EU [msn.com]. Maybe AMD could file a complaint in the USA also and have it successfully investigated. Once convicted of being an abusive monopoly the rules change.
In theory the UK monarch can veto any law parliament puts before him or her. In practice, vetoing rarely happens as it can lead to the removal of the monarchs head. Intel should be careful just how far they push this as states could just decide they are abusing their position and remove their right to x86 all together.
Re:Intel will license it (Score:4, Informative)
Intel wasn't actually convicted of abusing its monopoly status. It wasn't a monopoly. And it wasn't convicted.
It settled with an economic commission (none of these things are courts) and at that point decided it was cheaper to pay the fine (less than $50 million; about an hour's pay to Intel) than to fight it in a court.
In the settlement Intel admits no wrongdoing, and the Japanese assert none.
Re:Intel will license it (Score:4, Informative)
You are apparently ignorant of history.
You apparently can't even be bothered to read the wikipedia entry on AMD [wikipedia.org].
Intel licensed x86 to AMD originally because Intel was unable to keep up with demand.
AMD was a second source for the 8086 and 8088 because IBM demanded two sources, not because Intel couldn't make enough.
AMD refused to stop making x86's, and sued Intel to keep the right to do so. AMD actually LOST that case,
AMD was the one who challenged the x86 license cancellation and won the case in arbitration, and after numerous appeals it was upheld b the California Supreme Court.
They renewed the license in 2001. AMD has now breached the license.
Given that the licensing agreement isn't public, your analysis is clearly pulled straight from your rectum.
Intel has no responsibility to keep AMD in business.
The amusing thing about cross licensing agreements is that they cross. You can't really cancel half a contract. If Intel forces AMD out of the x86 CPU market... then Intel is out of it too, unless they intend to use something other than EMT64, which is a licensed implementation of AMD's proprietary AMD64.
Natural law is against being a failure like AMD.
Oh, I see. Your an Intel fanboy. That explains it.
who moderated this fool up so high?
Old and busted = Mhz (Score:5, Interesting)
New hotness = Lawyers on retainer!
I for one, will miss the Megahertz Myth race.. But hey, it might go crazy when AMD has a GPU as the Vector CPU in the computer, and Intel has to sell a 63-bit processor.
I guess it will be exciting to watch new developments again.. Seems they've gotten a little to comfortable with each others positions lately..
It won't succeed (Score:3, Insightful)
If Intel becomes the exclusive provider of x86 chips, they'll be smacked by the government with anti-trust litigation (Note: I did not say WHICH government, my fellow silly Americans). It was the same with Apple being the company Microsoft pointed to when it was hit with anti-trust. Intel is simply hoping that AMD is too fearful to engage in litigation, or risk folding the business, simply to expose Intel to government action -- they are betting that AMD simply accepts whatever monthly tribute is required by Intel, thus assuring it's continued irrelevance without being wholly dismissed out of the market. If AMD still had its balls, they'd call the bluff and tell Intel to go to hell -- because Intel needs AMD a lot more than they're letting on.
GF may not be a "subsidiary" according to Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
...but isn't that generally what a company that is in majority controlled by another company called?
Also, would AMD really have been so short-sighted as to sign a cross-licensing agreement with Intel that wouldn't allow AMD to contract an unlicensed third party to fabricate AMD's designs under AMD's licenses as an agent of AMD?
x86 was a hack anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
Not trying to sound like a troll here, but x86 should have been retired decades ago. It designed in a totally different era and was never intended to scale well and its been a series of hacks to get it to do so. ( it was impossible to predict where we were going back then, the cpu industry was far too immature )
Sure, they have done wonders keeping it moving, but its long since time to start over with a clean architecture.
My preference would be MIPS or SPARC inspired, but thats just me, either way its time to move on/up.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem is, you would lose 50-70% of the existing computer market. Apple tried switching CPUs and in both cases needed massive hand-holding of customers, emulation and dedicated support from vendors. Sorry, but the Windows market doesn't have the same level of vendor committment.
Sure, lots of major software vendors (think Symantec) would help out their customers and would have a new chip architecture supported from day 1. And if there were no other vendors out there, it would be a pain-free transiation.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish Slashdotters would stop with the incessant "x86 sucks" mantra. You're all fools.
There's plenty of crufty old instructions in the x86 ISA; no modern compilers generate them though, so no one cares that they're there. They take up a couple pages in the ISA manual I guess. The die area it takes to implement them is totally, completely insignificant. They're either in microcode (along with a bunch of other really useful instructions) or the hardware already exists for some other reason.
There's plenty of crufty segmentation and weird ways of laying out memory and whatnot; no modern OS uses that though, so no one cares that it's there. And again with the ISA manuals and some transistors. And there's plenty of modern paging and flat memory models and whatnot too.
AMD and Intel both know how to make good, fast, and (relatively) small hardware to decode variable-length x86 instructions. Yes, of course an x86 decoder is bigger (i.e. more expensive, more difficult to implement, etc.) than a RISC fixed-length decoder, but again, no one cares because we already know how to do it fast enough and cheap enough. Check out an x86 die photo sometime; most of it is cache. Probably about 1/50th is decoder.
And CISC-style+variable-length instructions get you a smaller code footprint and thus better instruction cache utilization vs. what you'd get with a fixed-length instruction stream. Examples: common ops get shorter instructions, there are more flexible addressing modes, more flexible sources/dests within a single instruction, you get one x86 instruction (no more than 15 bytes) to do what would take multiple RISC-style instructions (probably more than 15 bytes).
Sure there's the crufty x87 floating point stack. But there's also the shiny new SSE/SSE2/SSE3/whatever instructions, and modern compilers can exclusively use SSE/SSE2 to do the exact same thing (-mfpmath=sse does it in gcc). And again, die area for x87 FP stuff isn't a big deal since a lot of the hardware is shared with SSE.
ISA extensions have been added to cover all the newfangled SIMD stuff and virtualization you can want. AMD64 covers 64-bit stuff. And 64-bit stuff gives you extra registers too (8 extra integer, 8 extra SSE for a total of 16 each), which is great and a nod to the large number of registers that RISC machines give you.
In short, what the hell is everyone bitching about?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If this were all true, how is it that the ARM Cortex-A9 chip is able to get four superscalar RISC cores on a 65nm chip running at over 1GHz
And how many actual instruction does that retire per second? Does its FPU perform at even a fraction of the equivalent x86 (I was surprised to see that it even had one -- I wrote a small program for my ARMv4 phone and spent a solid hour wondering why a program that runs in a few seconds on my desktop took many minutes on there. Punchline: don't do double-precision floating point math on your phone)? What about pagetables, interrupts, DMA and coherent cache? Memory controller? FSB/QPI?
ARM is a wonderful arc
Maybe Intel is scared of globalfoundaries? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe Intel is scared of globalfoundaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
The tiny problem with Dubai is its money isn't made in oil, but in banking and tourism. One good indicator of how fucked its economy is, is that they're passing a law banning journalistic discussion of the economy.
And all the new building projects are being shelved as well.
http://www.kippreport.com/kipp/2009/01/21/what-freedom-of-speech/ [kippreport.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Dubai is sinking like a rock lately. Overpriced real estate, overpriced living, with nothing of substance behind it.
http://smashingtelly.com/2009/02/15/bye-bye-dubai/ [smashingtelly.com]
Stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
I personally think that's a damn stupid threat for Intel to make. AMD is arguably the only company that is preventing Intel from being broken up as a monopoly... you don't threaten to bury your only competition when you're nearly a monopoly. The various governments around the world aren't appreciative of that type of behavior. Unless they would like to be broken into dozens of pieces.
Dont see why they need a licence (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, AMDs foundry probably is considered to have inherited the licence so I dont know if Intels claims really hold up.
Its been a long time since the chip architecture and schematic of AMDs chips have been directly based on Intels, if they ever have been. The only thing they share is the instruction set. Instruction sets are basically a language or communication protocol and these should not be copyrightable, just as someone could not copyright HTML, IM protocols or English. Only an implementation of software of these can be copyrighted not the language itself.
In my opinion, AMD does not need any licence to implement the ISA in the first place, just as a licence is not required to implement an SQL server or a computer language. Languages are simply not copywritable.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So, by "get steamrolled" I have to assume you mean, license their new patent or whatever allowed them to outcompete you and then get back in the game thereby causing a more rapid improvement?
No, I mean use their massive power of scale to incorporate your innovation (which is licensed at some unknown price set by persons unknown), improve their brand while yours is nonexistent, and figure out how to make the product without paying you fees, all in less time than it takes you to reocup R&D. Or they could steal your idea anyway, but that happens already.
Oh, wait...you meant you fear competition and hope to profit for life off of one halfway decent idea?
Patents are protection from competition for a period of time in exchange for documenting your work. Taking that away hardly makes it appealing
Bait and swtich (Score:5, Interesting)
This is probably just high stakes gambling. AMD has little to lose. (I say that as an AMD share holder looking at my $2.49 stock price.) Intel has more to lose if they have to redo the 64Bit code. According to the reading, if Intel wins, they get rid of AMD, and become a defacto monopoly having to face US and EU anti-trust regulators. If AMD wins, they get to go along as before and Intel can't sell 64-bit CPUs that people want.
Basically I bet AMD's lawyers are saying "Go ahead make my day." Given the above even if Intel wins in court, they lose.
Bring back Alpha... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I recall correctly, both Intel and AMD have licensed Alpha technology from DEC-I-mean-Compaq-I-mean-HP. Maybe they could get together with a 64-bit architecture that actually works well.
Oh well, X86 was nice while it lasted (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like we either choose ARM or PowerPC to replace X86 technology and run X86 programs via emulation.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
The two-party system is here to stay in American politics and the x86 stranglehold.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Funny)
The two-party system is here to stay in American politics and the x86 stranglehold.
And operating systems and phone companies and potato chips and cereals and sexes.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Funny)
Feel free to mock me, however.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new strong ARM'd overlords.
Poor Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wif fud? Liek a Win7 license in a Happy Meal? I think MacDonald would rather keep the Apple pie license.
Laugh now (Score:5, Interesting)
The ARM netbooks and embedded devices are coming and there's nothing Microsoft or Intel can do about it except adapt [zdnetasia.com] and compete [eurotech-inc.com]. The time when you could defeat a good technology with an evangelist is long gone since the public now knows evangelists are just shills for hire. The day a MS rep could derail a Linux deployment with a sneer has passed. Sorry Enderle, your day is done.
Intel will choose to compete and they have a good start because they started years ago. As the Atom die shrinks and gains SOC capabilities, its power requirements will come down. Maybe not to ARM levels, but to an acceptable level faster than ARM can bring their performance up to acceptable levels for a good user experience. Microsoft will choose to use the tools they have, and fail to adapt. That's what they do. They can't grasp a market that's abandoned the need for them. It's alien to their corporate culture. After they've failed in the market they'll buy an ARM OS vendor and try, but that's five years hence. and they'll buy five of them badly and integrate them poorly and we'll laugh at their ineptitude here.
Ultimately Intel will win this one but there will be some interesting side stories and products between now and then. Microsoft will lose because they choose not to port to the interesting new platform Linux runs on already, and so when the channels merge again they will have lost share. By then low power devices might be most of the share, at least for end user devices.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Funny)
sounds RISCy.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Funny)
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Funny)
Just don't upset the ALPHA overload and you should be fine. Otherwise, he met send you on a one way trip on the Itanic.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Agree, ARM has been gaining grounds due to it's low (as none) power consumption when idle. So long backward compatibility tough.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Apple, Microsoft, and Sony (at the least) have all changed architectures without losing all binary backward compatibility.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
emulation works to a point but
1: it's very hard to get it perfect
2: you generally lose a lot of performance. This is not an issue when emulating really old stuff but trying to emulate x86 on the comparitively slow arm is going to give terrible performance.
Sometimes you can get away with it. Apple did a pretty good job all considered. Sony screwed up pretty badly imo (even thier PSone emulation has bugs and thier partially software PS2 bc on the european PS3 was pretty terrible at least with ratchet and clan
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux users would be less screwed since everything is open source - same apps, just new binaries to work with your old data. Windows users would be screwed royally since they would almost certainly have to relicense/repurchase all their apps, or run their old ones in emulation. But apple got away with it...
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
People who? Do you really think that 99% of the computer users even know what x86 means?
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
-They- being the PC manufacturers that sell most PC's these days. -They- being the OS vendors who would be into a world of hurt trying to support every differing configuration of the x86+ based architectures....
Since x86_64 is a superset of x86, would this mean AMD couldn't even sell x86_64 based chips either?
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Informative)
Since x86_64 is a superset of x86, would this mean AMD couldn't even sell x86_64 based chips either?
Funny thing is that AMD licensed/agreed to share their x86_64 arch back to Intel.
So essentially it's:
"I'll let you play with mine if I can play with yours."
Now a 3rd party (loosely affiliated with AMD) is playing with Intel's x86, and that wasn't part of the agreement.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Funny)
"I'll let you play with mine if I can play with yours."
Man, if I had a nickel...
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Funny)
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel has no intention of preventing AMD from making x86 chips, because they know they'll be unable to manufacture any of their own chips as well (with x86-64 licensing coming from AMD). This is purely meant to ensure that anybody who might come along and acquire the foundry business doesn't wind up trying to produce their own x86 chips. Or at least, I'd like to believe such...truthfully, I wouldn't put it past Intel to just be making a money grab here.
Either way, holding AMD in violation of their agreement means they would effectively forfeit 64-bit licensing rights as well, and that makes no sense for them.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Either way, holding AMD in violation of their agreement means they would effectively forfeit 64-bit licensing rights as well, and that makes no sense for them.
Says you! That Itanium line is going to just take off any day now, and then AMD and their crazy backwards-compatible technology will be left out in the cold!
You don't know how this works (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel can shut down AMD's ability to use the X86 technology without giving up the AMD-64 technology if they can show that AMD defaulted on the agreement.
AMD can use the X86 technology and prevent Intel from using the AMD-64 technology if they prevail.
A court is going to have to measure this. The smart money is on a settlement but barring that Intel will win.
Let us meet here again in seven years, when the matter is settled.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's okay, because there's no way Intel would ever pull the trigger. This is just corporate posturing to get a better crosslicensing agreement and a slice of the Foundry's pie. They'll fight it out for a couple more weeks and then a "settlement" will be reached behind some closed doors, probably with the Foundry agreeing not to mint over N non-x86 chips and some cash changing hands in whichever direction.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That pretty much
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's okay, because there's no way Intel would ever pull the trigger. This is just corporate posturing to get a better crosslicensing agreement and a slice of the Foundry's pie.
RTFA carefully.
By alleging that AMD is violating the agreement, Intel can pull the trigger on AMD and still use AMD's patents.
Because of Intel's threat, AMD is saying that they can pull the trigger and still use Intel's patents.
It's an interesting game of chicken that they're both playing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a lot at stake.
It appears from the snippet of Intel-AMD agreement posted that I've seen (at Tech Report, in comments) that The Foundry Company is perfectly fine under the agreement, as AMD has a certain share of the company, and it formed from AMD's assets.
So Intel might be playing with fire. They lose this, they've just lost x86-64 - and Itanium is dead due to minimal investment in the past 5 years, and this year is when 64-bit x86 will hit the common desktop with Windows 7. More likely that AMD wo
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Funny)
RTFA carefully.
You must be new here...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like apple was in a world of hurt when they dropped the more elegant PowerPC for ix86?
Yup, really killed them off didn't it.
( I still think it was a bad move, but no sense harping on it now.. )
A complete change over would allow a more controlled HAL standard to be developed too.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it time for AMD to make some more steps in throwing out the heritage from x86? Yes an x86-64 CPU can run in backward compatible 16 and 32 bit modes. In fact they still start up in 16 bit mode from which they have to be switched to 32 and then 64 bit mode. But the 64 bit mode could have done more to remain backwards compatible with old 16 and 32 bit code, however at the time AMD made the bold decision to allow some old software to not work in the 64 bit mode. Maybe it is time to take another step in getting rid of the heritage. How about making it possible for the CPUs to start up directly in 64 bit mode? That would be a natural next step towards completely getting rid of the backward compatible modes. The 64 bit instruction set can hardly be called the same instruction set as the 32 and 16 bit ones, first of all it is 64 bits, and it also has more general purpose registers. Those are clear distinctions from the old instruction set, and it was created by AMD, so I don't think Intel could prevent them from using it. I know you can run 16 and 32 bit code in the 64 bit mode, and a lot of people still use it (at least the 32 bit code), but I still think we are at the point where the 64 bit AMD ISA is more important than the 32 bit Intel ISA.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Interesting)
Today's chips, at their core, look a lot like RISC chips. They do a lot of work to hide that, translating x86 ops to native ops. I'd like to see a chip that can run in a x86 'translated' mode and a 'native' RISC mode, much like was done with 32bit/64 bit.
this is, admittedly, a much harder task to accomplish, but exposing a more efficient RISC mode would drive OS vendors to migrate to that. With a bit of careful juggling and VM technology the chips would allow legacy code to run while exposing the more efficient native modes to software that took advantage of it.
Such a shift would take time, but so is 64bit.
Oh well, I guess I'll go back to the idea lab and keep on dreaming.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Today's chips, at their core, look a lot like RISC chips. They do a lot of work to hide that, translating x86 ops to native ops. I'd like to see a chip that can run in a x86 'translated' mode and a 'native' RISC mode, much like was done with 32bit/64 bit.
Except wouldn't that potentially be slower? More data would need loading off the disk into memory, and from memory into cache, since the RISC translation is (usually) larger.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot 'wrong' with IA32, but I'm not so sure it would be worth using a 100% RISC ISA as an alternative. Complex instructions can be beneficial.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
(Disclaimer: I don't know that much about chip design, and some bits of the next paragraph may be misleading, half-remembered or misrepresent Intel's motives.)
IIRC, during the x86's long development (or mutation), Intel added some features because they could, and because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of those features were never much used, or turned out to be not such a good idea, or were rendered mostly irrelevant by design changes in the next generation. Still, once they'd been included they had to support them for evermore, because they couldn't risk breaking compatibility with code that *did* use them.
Now, I assume that the current chips' RISC cores was designed because it suits Intel's current way of implementing the x86-emulation/execution (and as the other guy said, wasn't designed for end-user/program use). If Intel come up with a smart, new and totally different design/architecture, the way things stand, they could simply replace it with a different core that used different microcode instructions, and change the x86 "wrapper".
If Intel had exposed the microcode of the previous generation, they'd either have to stick with the old core architecture, or include it as emulation. Except because it was emulated, it probably wouldn't run as fast, and old (i.e. *existing*) programs that used the old microcode would probably run slower on the new chips. So they'd be forced to stick with the old architecture.
(Essentially it's the hybrid software/hardware equivalent of (e.g.) someone exposing the implementation details of a Java class simply because they "can" or "someone might want to use it". If in future they want to redesign that class in a more efficient manner, they have to worry about code that used the old implementation's internal workings.)
All because they exposed some microcode functionality which wasn't even meant to be anything more than a "black box" implementation detail- unsuitable for general use- in the first place.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Informative)
I'd like to see a chip that can run in a x86 'translated' mode and a 'native' RISC mode, much like was done with 32bit/64 bit.
Already ready to use. The Transmeta Crusoe processor does this on the fly. Of course, now they're owned (or is that pwned?) by Novafora [novafora.com] so your guess is as good as mine whether this will survive.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. While it does develop on prior art, it also implements something new, and so it's considered new technology. It'd be like me trying to copyright the letter e, and then suing you for using the word "the".
There's also no way that Intel would pu
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, but most users don't need to. Microsoft does, and Microsoft has no reason to want any one other firm to be indispensable to PC vendors the way Microsoft is. So, if the AMD cross-licensing agreement goes away and there isn't serious competition for Intel in the x86 world, I'd expect Microsoft to start supporting alternatives.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if the AMD cross-licensing agreement goes away and there isn't serious competition for Intel in the x86 world, I'd expect Microsoft to start supporting alternatives.
Windows already ships by the million on PowerPC hardware: XBox 360.
Before the XBox 360 came out, the development environment that Microsoft was supplying was Windows ported to Power Mac hardware (G5 I believe).
AMD x86 processors aren't going away, though. This is intel just flexing its muscles, spreading FUD to get AMD's share price down and to scare consumers away from its chips.
All of these big technology companies have patent cross-licensing deals with each other. You'd better believe that intel can't survive without AMD's patents, and AMD can't survive without intel's, or Sun's, HP's, Microsoft's, TI's, FreeScale's... and so on.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not true. Windows NT has run on Mips, i860, Alpha, PPC and Itanium. None of them ever had even 1% of the market.
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99% is a really high target man. I doubt that 99% of computer users know where the power switch is.
Maybe you should look to 5% or 10%
and the answer is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard this argument when it was "people will stop using windows".
It's nice to think about and all, but wake me up when it actually happens.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
HAHAHAHA.
I'm on my way to buy SUN stock right now.
Oops, maybe not.
OK, I'm off to buy stock in HP!
Errr...
I'm going to purchase some DEC stock!
Oh fooey.
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CELLebrate good times, come on!
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Intel has 18-wheeler-truckloads more resources for marketing than AMD will ever hope to garner. While there will always be the minority that will seek alternatives, Intel has the power to win them over, whether it'd be through financial incentives, equipment "giveaways" or brute-force, corporate style.
If AMD loses its x86 license, I'll speculate that AMD will have to choose the three obvious paths:
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's mutually assured destruction, x86-64 has become ubiquitous enough now alongside x86 that neither side would be stupid enough. In fact, you would end up with VIA being the only manufacturer who has agreements with both parties and thus legally allowed to manufacture x86 compatible processors
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Interesting)
But the big draw of windows is the inertia of 1,000,000 one-off apps that businesses have written. Microsoft would be scared of people moving to another architecture just because if people were making a (painful) switch anyway, they might look at the alternatives.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Cell is PPC based, can be faster than a Core i7 in some respects and is available cheaply in quantity.
If you are willing to order sufficient quantity, IBM can crank out fast and cheap PPC chips quite easily... They did it for both Sony and MS with their respective games consoles.
Emulation on the other hand will always incur a performance hit, sometimes quite a substantial one... Tho it helps if the CPU is designed to handle it. When the Alpha was still fairly new, you could run x86 emulation on it and a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Cell is PPC based, can be faster than a Core i7 in some respects and is available cheaply in quantity.
Fast as in, will run desktop applications fast, or can do some obscure math calculations fast? Because, according to most reports, Core i7 architectures (or scaled down versions) will be what Intel is going to be pushing for the next few years, and in every report I have read, they totally demolish the competition (x86) in "real" speed. Whereas the Cell was more or less built to run supercomputers, render HD video and do other CPU intensive processes compared to the Core i7 which was designed more for a d
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtualization makes the host arch less important, but we generally don't run a virtual instance of a different hardware platform. The reason is that there's a really high penalty of either recompiling (with the possibility of bugs) or full instruction emulation which makes runtime performance horrrrrrrible.
Most modern virtualization systems will run the guest OS almost natively using CPU's virtualization extensions to make the magic happen without much overhead.
Try running Windows on an ARM or PPC x86 emulator and see how long it takes before throwing your hands up in slowness frustration.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Informative)
Not all virtualization requires hardware extensions. In fact, VMware was doing it long before Intel and AMD added virtualization support to their processors. VMware pulled this off by doing dynamic translation, where the virtual machine monitor would transparently rewrite native x86 into virtualized x86 code. For the most part this was just doing a straight copy, and perhaps rewriting some jump addresses. Privileged code that runs in the OS kernel had to be rewritten as something equivalent that would run fine in an unprivileged process.
This really isn't so different from running .NET or Java code. The code starts out compiled to a virtual instruction set, and the JIT compiler translates this on the fly to something that can run natively on the CPU.
This is also how Rosetta worked in Mac OS X to run PPC apps on an x86 processor. XBox 360 does a similar thing to run old XBox games, since the 360 uses a PPC processor but the old XBox was x86.
Sure, you take a performance hit in doing this, but the apps generally get rewritten to run natively eventually, and the ones that don't end up being old enough that they run faster on modern hardware even with the extra translation layer.
Lead, follow, or get the hell out of my way. (Score:3, Informative)
But the big draw of windows is the inertia of 1,000,000 one-off apps that businesses have written. Microsoft would be scared of people moving to another architecture just because if people were making a (painful) switch anyway, they might look at the alternatives.
If you wrote the damn app, then learn to recompile it and move on to whatever/whomever is going to be pimping procs next month or next year. If you're that worried about your legacy apps, then learn to use virtualization.
Moores law didn't get to be a "law" by playing nice and waiting around. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of my way.
Inertia is as fast and powerful as the people behind it. Adapt or die. It's that simple.
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Windows is inherently portable? Thus speaks someone who hasn't tried switching the motherboard and CPU between Intel and AMD on a HP box, and watched Windows failing to boot because the OEM only included a HAL library for one of them.
Yes, there were Alpha and MIPS versions of Windows NT. No, there haven't been any for a long, long time. If it was just a matter of passing a different CPU flag at the top level of the compiler, it would have cost MS next to nothing to continue to provide support for XP, Vis
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or someone who never owned an Alpha system.
Strictly speaking you COULD run x86 apps on them, but the performance was abysmal.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Informative)
It IS just a matter of passing a different CPU flag. MS discontinued the MIPS, PPC, and Alpha versions because there was not only no demand for it, but the few people who bought it tied up lots of MS customer service time bitching that X86 programs didn't run on MIPs/PPC/Alpha.
Windows is no more married to X86 than Linux or OS X. In fact, I can tell you where to get a fairly modern Windows Kernel running on a PPC chip in pretty much any electronics store: The XBox 360.
The NT kernel was designed from the ground up to be portable. The only real reason it's currently only supporting X86 is because that's the only place there's any sort of demand. If X86 dies (And it won't. AMD and Intel both have lots to lose, though AMD more than Intel here), Microsoft will port over to PPC (Or whatever), throw on an emulation layer, and probably take the opportunity to break a whole bunch of crappy stuff in Windows that's maintained simply for backwards compatibility.
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Windows is not the issue... the millions of x86-dependent applications would be the issue. This isn't Linux where you just apt-get the version for your architecture.
They'd have to do something in emulation like Apple did with Rosetta, but then the non-x86 version of Windows would run most applications slowly and so PC magazine and consumer reports and your friendly neighborhood geek would recommend sticking with x86, since MS doesn't have Apple's option of simply making the old architecture go away.
Re:if they do that (Score:5, Funny)
Windows on PPC... Then Microsoft will tout how much faster PPC is than x86 based processors, and the world ends in an infinite loop.
Re:if they do that (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny that you should say that, because if the world ends at the infinite loop, we'll all be running Mac OS X [google.com].
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Microsoft has gotten where it is by being good at business, and being good at business does not consist of pushing a dying platform that it has no vested interested in.
So now they just push a dying os that they have a vested interest in?
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It also seems a bit unclear as to why Sun continue to develop and produce the SPARC
Because there is a demand for it, and it does things that x86 doesn't. 8 cores * 8 threads = awesome virtualization abilities. The ability for SPARCs to scale up in a linear fashion to > 100 cores in a single general-purpose SMP box positions it in the high-end datacenter realm, where PPC is, but not x86. Plus, SUN isn't going it alone. Fujitsu is on the SPARC bandwagon with them.
Re:MAD (Score:4, Interesting)
Something like that, but not perfectly symmetrically. While x86_64 is well-enough established that it would be inconvenient for Intel to have to go back to x86 and build a new, non-derivative extension with similar capabilities, it would be less of a problem for them than AMD losing the rights to use x86-anything.
Given that Intel and AMD don't have serious competition for desktop PCs right now, its possible that the a result that hurts Intel a lot but AMD more in the short term could benefit Intel in the long term, though really the intent here is almost certainly to get concessions from AMD on the basis that Intel may be able to prevail in court, and AMD stands to lose more if the agreement is terminated; it is extremely unlikely that Intel's goal is to terminate the agreement.
Re:MAD (Score:4, Insightful)
Like heck.
It would force both AMD and Intel to pull their chips temporarily.
The only thing Intel could sell is the Atom (32 bit only), and the original version of the Core (again, 32 bit only).
Yeah ... they'd still have a product to sell on the market, but a staggering amount of their products (most of the Core line) would simply stop.
Likewise AMD would still have the Geode and other chips to sell, but their desktop/server line would have to stop.
MS would probably continue okay (I hear Win7 runs okay on the Atom and old Core processors), but it would mean that we'd be back at 32bit limits for things like memory.
The groups that would be hurt the most (beyond AMD and Intel)? Computer retailers like Dell and Apple (whose products would have to be redesigned), and the American computer economy as a whole (I'm sure you'll be able to find AMD and Intel chips made in China that would keep shuffling off the assembly line just fine).
Re:"open" patent licencing as remedy to monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
No, their not. Abusing a monopoly position is.
I can certainly patent sexwidget and have a perfectly legal monopoly as the only company in the world producing them. Only if I try to force people to do other things not directly related to my sexwidget in order to get access to them is it considered abusing my monopoly status. In other words, if I try to force retailers to purchase other products like sexfoo & sexbar as a requirement for being able to sell sexwidgets, I'm abusing my monopoly.
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