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

Posted Nov 15, 2023 14:22 UTC (Wed) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing) by Wol
Parent article: The push to save Itanium

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.