Re: [oc] legality of cores?!

[Victor the Cleaner <jonathan@canuck.com>]

> > AMD must pay some royalties to Intel and I think Intel does this
> > just because of that monopol law...
> <snip>
> 
> From what I understand, in the past, AMD had a cross-licensing agreement
> with Intel after they spent years constantly suing each other. It was
> basically
> a truce after they found out only the lawyers were getting rich!

Well, a little history is in order.  Once upon a time before my beard
got gray, Intel wasn't really big and AMD was smaller.  Designers looked
less kindly on sole-sourced parts in those days, and second-sourcing
agreements between semi manufacturers were more common.  AMD had such an
agreement with Intel until the x86 family started to get big (with the
growth in the PC market) and Intel got greedy and tried to bust out of the
second-source agreement in order to corner the x86 market.  The upshot 
of that was that because of those agreements they wound up not being able
to stop AMD from producing compatible parts, so they started to get legally
"creative", claiming copyright protection on first the instruction mnemonics, 
and later the part *numbers* (ie 80486).  Ultimately they lost, with the 
courts deciding they couldn't copyright numbers, and that's when Intel 
started naming their CPUs "Pentium" instead of "80586", which is what that 
part would have otherwise been.

Hence the great and brilliant marketing strides that have occurred over
the last decade, most recently characterized by AMD "getting the jump" on 
Intel by announcing an Athlon 4 before Intel could announce a Celeron 4, 
(or something equally earthshattering), thus presumably causing the public
to believe that, because they've got a bigger number, they have a superior
part.

Sheesh.  Makes me want to just crawl under my desk and twitch.

Jonathan