juanrga :
palladin9479 :
AMD's perpetual x86 ISA license was given to them by a CA court judge, Intel can't terminate it. That was Intel trying to buffalo AMD and get them into another expensive protracted legal battle when their financial resources were strained. They would of went to court over the issue and there is little doubt that AMD's license would of been validated. GF doesn't design CPU's, they just manufacture them. AMD is who design's the CPU and thus use's the licensed x86 instruction set, they never transferred it.
Really Juan your reaching here and punching well above your weight class.
For your own education, here is some background on the numerous legal battles between AMD and Intel.
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective-2
By 1994, Intel had navigated the arbitration along its long journey up to the Supreme Court of California. The Supreme Court awarded AMD “a permanent, nonexclusive and royalty-free license to any Intel intellectual property embodied in the Am386” and “a two-year extension of certain patent and copyright licenses . . . related to the Am386.” AMD v. Intel, 885 P.2d at 998–99.
Nice to know that you are not only an 'expert' engineer but also an 'expert' in the law. Now continue reading the paragraph at the point where you stopped:
However, this result left several outstanding lawsuits unresolved, including a 1991 antitrust suit that AMD had brought against Intel in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. The two companies had battled each other in court for seven years and had spent over $100 million when they finally settled all remaining lawsuits in 1995. AMD received a perpetual license to the microcode found in Intel’s 386 and 486, but also agreed to not copy any other Intel microcode. Instead, AMD would develop its own chips in the future.
AMD received a perpetual license to 386/486 microcode, but
microcode != x86 ISA.
The "permanent, royalty-free license to all Intel patents in the Am386" sentence that you quote was eliminated after Intel appeal:
In paragraph 5 of the award, the arbitrator granted AMD a permanent, royalty-free license to all Intel patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property used in the Am386. The rights granted to AMD in paragraph 5 included both the right to make the Am386 and the right to have others make the Am386 for AMD. In paragraph 6, the arbitrator extended for two additional years, with respect to the Am386 only, a 1976 grant of certain patent and copyright licenses from Intel to AMD that the 1982 AMD-Intel agreement had extended until 1995. (Because paragraph 5 grants AMD an indefinite license to all Intel patents and copyrights used in the Am386, it is not immediately apparent what additional rights AMD gained by paragraph 6.)
After the arbitrator made his award, AMD petitioned the superior court to confirm the award and Intel petitioned to have the award corrected by deleting paragraphs 5 and 6. The court confirmed the award as made.
Intel appealed. On appeal, the Court of Appeal concluded that the arbitrator had exceeded his powers in fashioning the relief in paragraphs 5 and 6 because those paragraphs did not draw their essence from the AMD-Intel contract and lacked any rational nexus to it. The Court of Appeal corrected [9 Cal.4th 394] the award by deleting paragraphs 5 and 6 and confirmed the award as corrected, determining that it was unnecessary to vacate the award because the correction did not affect the merits of the decision.
AMD had to re-negotiate the x86 license. The famous x86 cross-licensing settlement was signed in
2001. AMD got x86-32 license plus some related licenses and Intel got x86-64 license plus some related licenses. This settlement was broken in early
2009
Intel to AMD: Your x86 License Expires in 60 Days
AMD's x86 license set to expire in 48 hours?
AMD knows very well that Intel holds the x86 license and their official response to Intel was:
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/business-and-law-features/41852-amd-and-intel-in-30-day-mediation-over-x86-cross-license-dispute
AMD and Intel signed a new x86 cross-licensing settlement.
It finishes the day 12 Nov 2014.
Not only the x86 ISA is a complete mess, but the x86 licenses/patents are a complete pain.
By all that AMD is migrating to ARM. Like it or no :lol:
@juanrga:
Evidently you are expert at neither of those fields:
Microcode
is the x86 ISA. It's the instruction sets
the microcode contains that define the ISA.
The paragraphs you cite are the excerpts from the portion where Intel appealed because the original ruling gave AMD access to
all Intel proprietary licensing,
and the rights to reverse engineer. The right to clean room reverse engineer was eventually rescinded by the appellate courts. So AMD cannot reverse engineer Intel hardware anymore...as the judge who ruled in the initial ruling judged that the IBM contract between AMD and Intel gave AMD rights to reproduce all Intel hardware as if they were Intel. The appellate court (on the second appeal mind you...the first appeal was shot down) came in and said that the ruling was overstepping boundaries and the original agreement with IBM did not merit such considerations for AMD. They ruled that AMD had to develop proprietary hardware of their own, but had access to the original x86-32 microcode
a.k.a. the x86 ISA.
AMD is not moving to ARM anytime soon, and x86 is not going anywhere out of the consumer sector anytime soon either.
As for Intel threatening AMD:
The only threat that Intel can leverage is the use of extensions newer than those AMD already has a license for, or in layman's terms, extensions after AVX2. In order to compete AMD would need to be able to access those extensions so they can continue to run compatible code.
However, AMD can produce x86-64 ISA CPUs that use up to AVX2 instruction sets indefinitely. Intel was trolling AMD, and if they breach the agreement, AMD can literally pull their license for x86-64 to Intel and instantly render all their future products incompatible with 64 bit instruction sets.
In this instance, AMD literally has Intel over a barrel, and Intel is aware of it, but they are trolls anyway..
Reread all of what you posted
in it's original context.
Also, might want to google processor microcode wikipedia entries, or whatever else you can find. Basically, x86 ISA without microcode is nothing.
The ISA does not define hardware designs, rather, it defines what instruction set compatabilities the hardware must have to conform to the ISA. This is why AMD and Intel hardware can be so drastically different and still function as x86 CPUs, because the hardware itself is irrelevant as long as you can produce the desired outcome from the instructions processed.
In fact, GCN can actually run up to SSE4 x86-64 code if you want to get technical about it. If you think AMD is concerned enough about their licensing to switch to ARM entirely, then why did they make even their GPUs capable of running x86 instruction sets? Answer: because they're not concerned at all.
Good reading to bring you up to speed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode
Also, might want to read up on ASM, because it is the most basic use of those microcode instructions we are discussing, and really opens up how everything "works"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language
Now that we've established you're reaching desperately, please...go back to speculating about Kaveri, as your "ARM is going to rule the world" nonsense wore out it's welcome
long, Long, LONG, ago...
/educational section
more like Amd were ging to undercut them no matter what and getting all those developers etc on board before releasing hsa apus, if this was 8 years ago they would have just released kaveri and said 'but it would perform like this if software utilized it fully' with no software fully using it of course.
I already quoted this from the court decision:
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