Report: Intel Could Face Acquisition, Units to Remain Together

[3valatzy]

License?
Intel OWNS x86!
You are confusing AMD and VIA with intel. Whomever buys intel buys x86.

Whoever buys Intel, loses the x86 license. This is the cross-licensing agreement between AMD and Intel.
Also, x86 is nothing without the AMD 64-bit technology.

View attachment 380410

 

[AusWolf]

Actually, if you recall the origin of Atom and the 'mont cores, it was so Intel could enter the ultra mobile market. They were putting all the tools in place to make a mobile SOC, but what debuted was a terrible product. Battery life was bad, performance wasn't great, it ran hot. With the death of Itanic before it, it was a pretty solid indicator of how much Intel depended on its success in desktop/workstation/server x86, as they've really struggled to enter any other market, much less overtake one. Even their GPU efforts are mediocre at best. Alchemist was really late and a disappointment, and while Battlemage isn't a bad product, it's a $259 card that hasn't even caused a price adjustment from AMD and NVIDIA. The high-end BM card is not even production ready.

In hind site, Intel has been treading water for at least 5 years, doing everything they can to make their process perform. That ended with Arrow Lake, or maybe even Raptor Lake. All of a sudden, Intel is out of answers to the competition.

In my opinion, Intel's biggest problem is that they divide their attention too many ways. They've got way too many projects running simultaneously, all of them returning mediocre results, and leaving an "oh, just another Lake" taste in our mouths. In the GPU front, they've got nothing disruptive. I don't know why the B580 got so much praise. It's a 7600/4060 with some extra VRAM and no availability whatsoever (in the UK).

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

It is noteworthy that AMD64 extensions (and Intel's licensed equivalent, marketed as EM64T) cannot/will not work without the x86 base set.

Intel was in the process of removing all that 16 and 32 bit registers from x86 in order to remove all the physical transistors needed, hence enhancing their chances against Arm.

That was stopped when they created the new consortium with AMD, but i think that they will still proceed with the plan, since its possible that modern systems are not really using those registers anymore.

PS the terms used might be wrong but the concept and end goal is the same.

 

[Timbaloo]

Whoever buys Intel, loses the x86 license. This is the cross-licensing agreement between AMD and Intel.

That's just plain wrong. If one of the two companies was acquired, then the cross license deal with be terminated, therefore a new deal would have to be made. Or neither could sell a single CPU without violating patents and the like.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Intel was in the process of removing all that 16 and 32 bit registers from x86 in order to remove all the physical transistors needed, hence enhancing their chances against Arm.

That was stopped when they created the new consortium with AMD, but i think that they will still proceed with the plan, since its possible that modern systems are not really using those registers anymore.

PS the terms used might be wrong but the concept and end goal is the same.

x86-S was canned. But they very much are being used, at least as things currently stand.

 

[Daven]

Whoever buys Intel, loses the x86 license. This is the cross-licensing agreement between AMD and Intel.
Also, x86 is nothing without the AMD 64-bit technology.

Man, you must think legal agreements are written by God and become untransmuteable, physical laws of the universe.

Intel probably has 100’s of legal agreements with dozens of entities that will be resolved in such an acquisition. This happens anytime a company buys another. The x86 ownership/license is no more significant than say the term to supply years of product stock for service replacements. The lawyers from all involved parties rework and change these terms to make the acquisition go through.

No I think you really never been involved in a company buy out and you just don’t want Intel to disappear. I get it but larger companies have been acquired/merged which required so many agreements, terms, licenses, etc to be reworked.

It’s okay. Life will go on but Intel won’t. There is no magic that exists here that can stop that.

 

[Wirko]

The problem is that x86 patenting is a minefield, and each and every extension is covered through a different set of patents. Besides, US7499962, which is the patent for the fused multiply-add operation instruction, won't expire until 2026 and it's an absolute essential for modern operating systems. The patents for the full instruction set required to make an AMD Clawhammer-compatible processor (original socket 754 Athlon64 from 2003) still have not completely expired.

I understand it's a minefield, and apart from that, the real value of each of the important patents (or, indeed, the entire cross-licensing agreement) is only known after it's been tried in a court case.

Regarding this issue, are there any ISA extensions that AMD developed and Intel uses, and may still be encumbered by patents in 2025/2026?

 

[Timbaloo]

Regarding this issue, are there any ISA extensions that AMD developed and Intel uses, and may still be encumbered by patents in 2025/2026?

Basically the whole amd64/x64/x86-64 extensions that AMD developed in response to IA-64 (Itanium).

 

[AusWolf]

Regarding this issue, are there any ISA extensions that AMD developed and Intel uses, and may still be encumbered by patents in 2025/2026?

x86-64

 

[Wirko]

x86-64

From the linked article:

x86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD. Until April 2021 when the relevant patents expired, AMD held patents on techniques used in AMD64; those patents had to be licensed from AMD in order to implement AMD64. Intel entered into a cross-licensing agreement with AMD, licensing to AMD their patents on existing x86 techniques, and licensing from AMD their patents on techniques used in x86-64.

Unless new Mickey Mouse laws are passed of course.

The answer to my question above might be FMA3/FMA4 if it was originally developed by AMD, or even co-developed by both (the Wikipedia article does not make it clear).

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Whoever buys Intel, loses the x86 license. This is the cross-licensing agreement between AMD and Intel.
Also, x86 is nothing without the AMD 64-bit technology.

Intel does not lose the license to x86. It owns x86.

What the buyer would lose would be the automatic access to AMD64, which is now x86-64.

I'm not sure why this is hard for people to understand.

I don't make the distinction. It's all the same PC hardware, aka x86.

No it isnt. The server market is in no way threatened by cellphones, which would then make your statement "Although, it would be under pressure to explain why the PC industry was getting so far behind cellphones." incorrect.

The consumer market, arguably, IS, and the difference between the income from consumer hardware and professional server hardware is massive.

Distinction and context are important.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I understand it's a minefield, and apart from that, the real value of each of the important patents (or, indeed, the entire cross-licensing agreement) is only known after it's been tried in a court case.

Regarding this issue, are there any ISA extensions that AMD developed and Intel uses, and may still be encumbered by patents in 2025/2026?

I believe so, I haven't looked at it in a while. What I do know is that the earliest implementation of AMD64 architecture (so basically a Clawhammer compatible) should have all related patents expired by late 2026. Instructions like LAHF/SAHF and CMPXCHG16 required to run Windows 8.1 and newer will still take a while longer iirc