Intel to Fab 64-bit ARM Chips for Altera

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man, sometimes I have to admit, Intel is amazing at outmaneuvering the competition. it's not always legit (such as what they did w/ AMD), but Intel knows how to corner it's competitors...
 
I remember this time last year how everybody here was laughing at Intel, but they have the ball rolling now and it isn't going to be easy stopping so much momentum.

I hope the competition is up for a battle - because it's going to get quite ugly over the next year.
 
This isn't exactly huge news. It was announced a while back that Intel would be fabricating Altera's Stratix 10 series FPGAs and probably by extension the successors to the Arria V and Cyclone V series FPGAs as well. This includes both the vanilla FPGAs and SoC series FPGAs which have hard instantiated ARM cores on board.

Altera doesn't compete against Intel in any consumer markets. Altera's Cyclone and Stratix SoCs won't be found in desktops or mobile devices, they're found in engineering labs and on the desks of hobbyists.

This would be bigger news if they started manufacturing ARM chips for Qualcomm, Samsung, or Apple.
 


This is the thing that really bugs me, and it's been happening a LOT recently. Another example that pops to mind is HGST helium-filled drives. Two articles, virtually identical, with slightly different titles, within a couple days of each other.

I don't know if it's confusion on who's writing what article, or trying to get that article a certain number of pageviews, or what, but it's annoying.

 
I wish Intel would allow x86 emulation on Windows RT. That being said make Windows 8.2 run both arm and x86 on the same OS would be a huge advantage for PC market and vendors.
 
So, what's to keep some Intel engineers from obtaining a sample of said chip and reverse engineering it? Now Intel could make an ARM compatible chip with no license fees.
 


The same thing that stops them now, patents.
 


AMD reverse engineered the i386 (Am386) and i486 (Am486) while its litigation with Intel was still going on. They were not copies, but they were compatible, and ran the same software. That is why Intel switched to names for its products instead of numbers, you can't patent numbers. There are quite a few examples of one company reverse engineering another company's product that do not infringe on the original company's patents.


 


You are confusing patents and trademarks.

AMD was given a perpetual licence to the base 80386 patents used in AMD's 80386 clone as part of an anti-trust lawsuit against Intel in 1991.

Other companies either performed clean-room reimplementations aimed at binary compatibility while avoiding patent infringement, licensed the necessary patents, or designed microprocessors from the ground up purely based on instruction set references.

The 80386 trademark was rejected because it had fallen into common usage. Intel had not tried to trademark the 8080, 8086, 80186, or 80286 and this led to the 386 and 486 trademarks being rejected. They were essentially model numbers in the same way that the 7400 series ICs were model numbers.
 
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