AMD and Intel in 30-day mediation over x86 cross-license dispute

enigma067

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AMD and Intel in 30-day mediation over x86 cross-license dispute
Business and Law
By Rick C. Hodgin
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 14:16

Sunnyvale (CA) - AMD was able to provide TG Daily with an update on the current x86 cross-license dispute between their company and Intel. We were told "The law departments of both companies are in-contact with one another" attempting to come to a mutual agreement.

On Monday, March 16, Intel offered to AMD to make the terms of their x86 cross-license public. While AMD has no objection to this, they feel Intel's insistence on secrecy relating to the U.S. civil antitrust case is not appropriate. As such, they are using the offering as leverage against Intel to release documents in the antitrust lawsuit.

Michael Silverman, AMD Public Relations, told TG Daily today, "AMD would be happy to make the entire [x86] agreement public if Intel drops its insistence on secrecy concerning its exclusionary business practices under the guise of confidentiality it has imposed on evidence in the U.S. civil antitrust case. There is no commercial reason to have those documents under seal; it is simply a means for Intel to try to conceal its illegal behavior."

AMD has declined to comment further while the mediation is ongoing, and Intel did not respond by the time of this article's publication when a comment from them was requested.

Below is AMD's original statement on the matter printed in full:

Intel's action is an attempt to distract the world from the global antitrust scrutiny it faces. Should this matter proceed to litigation, we will prove that Intel fabricated this claim to interfere with our commercial relationships and thus has violated the cross-license.

AMD remains in full compliance with the cross-license agreement. And as we've stated all along, the structure of GLOBALFOUNDRIES takes into account all our cross-license agreements. We will continue to respect Intel's intellectual property rights, just as we expect them to respect ours.

Again, we believe that Intel manufactured this diversion as an attempt to distract attention from the increasing number of antitrust rulings against it around the world. With a ruling from the European Commission and a U.S. trial date looming, and investigations by the U.S. FTC and NY Attorney General, the clock is ticking on Intel's illegal practices - and yet with its dominant monopoly position it still tries to stifle competitors.

The AMD/Intel cross-license agreement is a two-way agreement, the benefits of which go to both companies. Intel leverages innovative AMD IP critical for its product designs under the cross license. This includes AMD patents related to 64-bit architecture extensions, integrated memory controller, multi-core architecture, etc.). The cross-license is very much a two-way street.

In fact, we informed Intel that their attempt to terminate AMD's license itself constitutes a breach of the cross-license agreement, which, if uncured, gives AMD the right to terminate Intel's license.

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-41852-118.html
 

The_Blood_Raven

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Don't murder me for this but I hope AMD wins this one so that they can have some more $ to compete with Intel so that an unlocked multiplier version of i7 becomes less than $500 (1 can dream right?).
 

yomamafor1

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/yawn

I'm pretty sure AMD will keep their Global Foundry, and Intel will have its anti-trust lawsuit reduced, or even dropped. Company politics at its finest.
 

salem80

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if Intel win ....will back to Pentium4 days and no more Dual Core ,Core2 Duo ,Quad Core,Core i7 no 64bit processors ....
because Intel License it from AMD
read more
x86_64 is an AMD based design, done while Intel wasted time and money on Itanium, which was slated for larger servers. You wouldn't have 64bit processors in your home PC today without AMD's efforts.

Opteron was a significant step up in x86_64 server chips, and one of the reasons Itanium never caught traction. While Intel/HP were struggling down that path, Opteron provided solid server performance with a simpler migration path. If anything, AMD's success with Opteron forced Intel to refocus on their core market.

AMD forced Intel to focus on architecture and to de-emphasize clock speed as the only performance enhancer. AMD chips out performed Intel clock-per-clock for a long time. Intel finally went back to the architecture and now we have Core2 and I7. Both superior to the netburst architecture in terms of work per clock and work per watt.

AMD beat Intel to market with processors that directly connected to DRAM memory, bypassing the bridge.

AMD beat Intel to true multicore on a single die. Not hyper threading, and not packaging tricks, but true multicore.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10198461-64.html

 
x86_64 is an AMD based design, done while Intel wasted time and money on Itanium, which was slated for larger servers. You wouldn't have 64bit processors in your home PC today without AMD's efforts.


Actually this one is wrong. Itanium was first slated for servers THEN home use. Just like every other Intel/AMD CPU is. So even without AMD sticking us with the nearly 30 year old x86 arch we would have had IA64 instead.

Opteron was a significant step up in x86_64 server chips, and one of the reasons Itanium never caught traction. While Intel/HP were struggling down that path, Opteron provided solid server performance with a simpler migration path. If anything, AMD's success with Opteron forced Intel to refocus on their core market.

IA64 was actually a better 64bit performer than x86-64 is. Problem is that the migration to IA64 would have been too much since x86 was emulated on it and thus was about 20%+/- slower. Its just like the Cell processor and why IBM wont release it to the market. That and the fact that Cell is much harder to code for than x86 is.

TBH, I hate CNet. The people they have are not very well educated on much and get paid a lot to talk about most things they don't know when simple forum posters such as me and a few othere here know much more and get paid crap.
 

t85us

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you are absolutely right !
just remember the 286,386 and 486 era. there were almoust absolutely NO innovations (16bit to 32bit, clock freq from 7MHz to 66MHz; since AMD released it's K5 586chips which fitted in 486mobos intel begun innovating).
getting from 286 to 486 in more than 5 years ? or something like that. now with amd they are FORCED to do something new (like core2, i7). that's great for us, consumers, isn't it ?
so all intel fanboys, thank AMD for being with us
 

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