In which Intel acts like a spoiled child (again)

[unixronin]

In the light of AMD's recent spinning off of its manufacturing capacity as GlobalFoundries, jointly held by AMD and the Abu Dhabi government's Advanced Technology Investment Co. (ATIC holds 55% of the stock to AMD's 45%, but both have equal voting rights), Intel has announced it considers GlobalFoundries to not be a subsidiary of AMD and is threatening to revoke the 2001 Intel-AMD patent cross-licensing agreement.  Speculation is this is an attempt both to box AMD in through litigation (an old and familiar Intel gambit) and to distract attention from recent antitrust battles with the European Commission (for basically bribing a large retailer not to carry AMD devices), Japan, Korea, and the US.

Whatever the motivation, this would be a stupid move for Intel.  Honestly, at this point, Intel probably stands to lose more from losing access to AMD's patents than AMD does from losing access to Intel's, even disregarding the further blemishing of Intel's already tarnished image as a chipmaker that markets with its legal department (though there seems to be little evidence Intel really cares about the latter), as I believe Intel's EMT64 implementation of the AMD64 (aka x86-64) 64-bit extended instruction set is covered by AMD patents that Intel gains rights to under the cross-licensing agreement. Intel would thus lose the ability to legally manufacture AMD64-compatible 64-bit chips, leaving it with only the much-reviled and mostly-moribund Itanium chip in the 64-bit market.

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Intel has learned a lot from their close association with Micro$oft.