EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)

Posted Nov 14, 2023 10:12 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing) by joib
Parent article: The push to save Itanium

IIRC Intel was making various threats towards AMD wrt licensing various aspects of the x86 ISA. AMD was definitely in a kind of legal underdog situation. Inventing x86-64 put AMD in a much stronger position and forced Intel into a cross licensing arrangement, guaranteeing a long lasting patent peace. Which was good for customers.

There would have had to be some sort of arrangement in any case, because large customers (think, e.g., US government) tend to insist on having two different suppliers for important stuff.

EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)

Posted Nov 15, 2023 13:27 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Wich is why I mentioned the 686. I don't remember the details, but there was some sort of deal (with IBM?) and Cyrix which meant the 686 was legally licenced, and I thought AMD had inherited that. Either way, I'm sure AMD had some sort of grandfather licence deal.

Cheers,
Wol

EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)

Posted Nov 15, 2023 14:22 UTC (Wed) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

It largely goes back to the early IBM PC days, when both IBM and AMD acquired second-source licenses so they could make chips up to (and including) the 286 using Intel's designs, including patent cross-licenses.

They weren't the only ones.

When Intel and HP got together to create Merced (the original Itanium), they put the intellectual property into a company they both owned, but which didn't have any cross-license agreements in place, which is why AMD wouldn't have been able to make Itanium-compatible processors except on Intel's (and HP's) terms.