Without knowing any additional details of the agreement, I don't see how Intel will let this slide. The terms of their agreement are mostly likely violated at least in spirit, if not in the letter. Not only that, but it will have to get past export controls that have very recently stopped exports of Intel processors bound for China, I have no doubt they will find a joint venture to develop similar processors an easy target. If it gets past that, I would expect a lengthy lawsuit from Intel. Seems very risky from AMD's perspective.
All of their cross licensing agreements are private so everything is speculation. That being said...
In 2009 AMD divested itself of it's manufacturing arm by spinning it off into GlobalFoundries (GF) which was a joint venture with Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC). Intel sued AMD, GF, and ATIC for violation of the terms of AMD and Intel's prior cross licensing agreements.
Later that year Intel and AMD entered into a Settlement Agreement to halt several on going lawsuits both parties had against each other. The AMD/GF/ATIC lawsuit was one of those that was part of the settlement agreement. Under section 4 of the settlement agreement are the mutual releases each company agreed to. Section 4.2 is Intel's release and it states the following.
4.2 Intel Release. Except for the rights and obligations expressly created or reserved by this Agreement and by the agreements described in Section 3.7, Intel does hereby irrevocably release, acquit and forever discharge AMD, GF and ATIC from any and all Claims that Intel ever had, now has or hereafter may acquire against AMD, GF and ATIC, whether known or unknown, on account of any action, inaction, matter, thing or event, that occurred or failed to occur at any time in the past, from the beginning of time through and including the Effective Date, including, without limitation, any and all Claims based on or arising out of, in whole or in part, the Actions or the facts underlying the Actions and any claims that could have been raised in the Actions up to the Effective Date. All third parties included within the scope of the preceding release, pursuant to Section 1.4, are expressly agreed to be third-party beneficiaries of this Agreement.
It seems somewhat relevant to today's announcement as it seems to release AMD from litigation for any future joint ventures it might partake in. However I'm not a lawyer and it's entirely possible that I'm miss reading this.
Good info! This seems to confirm what some other sources are saying about the license agreement being null as of last year, and opens the floodgates to this sort of deal, as well as real buyouts of AMD. I'm very surprised this hasn't been more widely reported, though I can see why both parties wouldn't want this to necessarily be in the public eye until it benefited them most. It is also possible I missed the reporting on it when it came out. In any case, thanks!
> on account of any action, inaction, matter, thing or event, that occurred or failed to occur at any time in the past, from the beginning of time through and including the Effective Date
I think this is the key part here - Intel is basically agreeing to never sue about anything that happened through and including the Effective Date but it doesn't say anything about things that happen after the effective date. I really doubt Intel would agree to such a thing.
So unless AMD made the licensing agreement 7 years ago and kept it secret, it wouldn't be covered by that agreement. That would be an interesting fuck-you the next time one of these settlements happen, though.
For reference, here's the full text of the settlement(at least what was filed publicly with the SEC)[1]
It appears during the settlement they made a new patent cross-license agreement, which is not public of course. The new agreement is what is alleged by sources to have expired in 2015, which is what would allow AMD to license their IP to third-parties. It could also be that the patent agreement is more lenient than before, because at the very least it expanded to include at least one third party in the form of GlobalFoundries. If that is the case though, one wonders why this hasn't already happened.
Someone should really work towards making legal document as a testing framework against which user can send a query of an action and the output of query should be if action is allowed by that document or not. :)
It has nothing to do with the ROSS link but it shows just how great Watson could be at most things that involve natural language processing and more or less simple questions that could easily be cited from various sources.
Wouldn't surprise me if you could ask ROSS or any other legal aid based on Watson to go over a contract and ask if I do X what would happen, since it has access to both legislation and case law it might even could present you with a probabilistic outcome based on previous law suits which involved similar contracts and circumstances.
Another follow-up, the actual cross-license agreement is here[1]. From my reading of it, it can expire, among other times, when the last of the patents it covers expires. That implies to me that it is probably still in effect, since any patent covering AMD64 most likely is still valid in 2016. I don't know what or who to believe anymore.
Also, another thing that everyone points out when there's a discussion about AMD being acquired, is that "Intel wouldn't allow it" because of that clause in the license agreement. I think that argument makes no sense.
The only reason Intel hasn't completely crushed AMD so far (which it could've done by keeping prices low until it eliminated AMD) in the market, is because it doesn't want to remain a monopoly in the PC market. You think Google has it bad in the EU right now? It would be far worse for Intel (which already got fined $1.5 billion in the EU for anti-competitive practices against AMD).
The second reason why it doesn't make sense is that AMD owns the 64-bit ISA rights. I'm guessing Intel would still need that to operate in all markets except IoT...
So to end that argument once and for all - of course Intel would allow AMD to be acquired, one way or another. Worst case scenario, whoever acquires AMD would have to pay slightly higher royalties to Intel for the next 5 years.
Getting back on point, as the ExtremeTech post mentions, it's likely this is only IP that AMD alone owns anyway.
>> The second reason why it doesn't make sense is that AMD owns the 64-bit ISA rights. I'm guessing Intel would still need that to operate in all markets except IoT...
It would be interesting to see a chip that dropped support for the legacy instruction sets. If a server is running software fully built as 64bit, how much IP could be dropped from the underlying design? There may also be a bit of performance on the table for doing that as well, but probably not much. Certainly no significant die area savings these days.
The long mode 64b instruction set is similar enough to normal 16/32b i386 ISA that droping the 16/32b part will make no significant difference both in terms of IP and hardware resources.
On similar note, first AMD's 64b chips had some intentional limitations in backward compatibility with i386 ISA (that's why Microsoft says that it is not possible to run 16b programs on 64b windows due to hardware limitations), but newer chips do not have these limitations, probably because any cost savings are insignificant (which given the fact that most of the die area today are caches and not logic makes perfect sense).
I'm not sure anymore that EMT64 actually relies on any AMD IP, if articles are correct and the Intel-AMD cross-licensing agreement expired last year.
Intel has basically had a de-facto monopoly on the PC and server space for the past 5+ years so I don't really buy that argument either. The buyout pressure was real enough when AMD was splitting into AMD + GloFo that Abu Dhabi couldn't buy a controlling stake in AMD, much to their chagrin. That might be null now if there really is no more agreement, in which case I would be surprised if there was NOT a buyout offer in the next few years.
Edit: Also, as far as I can see from googling, the Rockchip deal doesn't actually exchange any IP, it simply allows them to customize existing Atom cores into SoCs.
>Intel might challenge the AMD deal, however the China partner apparently already has access to the technology. The Intel/AMD cross license was a five year deal that the companies failed to renew in 2015.
>The license granted rights “intended to cover only the products of the Licensed Parties.” The heavily redacted document lists a dozen exceptions to its terms, most of them not made public. Intel declined to comment on details of the patent agreement.
>“All the technologies licensed [to the China joint venture] are AMD technologies and there are no encumbrances,” said AMD’s Su. “We have closed the deal and have started execution on it,” she added noting she also doesn’t see any regulatory issues. (Recently, U.S. regulators have increased their vigilance in turning down high tech investment proposed by China.)
I have seen speculation that many of the relevant x86 patents expired in 2015.
Well according to this other article, Intel and AMD's patent cross-license expired in 2015[1]. I'm not sure if that was the only agreement they had relating to x86 IP, but if so that makes this deal more likely to go through, if they can get past the export controls.
I am slightly curious how much actual innovation (new patents) there are since 1996, that would need to be cross licensed by either given company... the bulk of legacy x86 (not x86-64) is expired. Excluding certain extensions.
Yeah, I have no idea and I also suspect that very few new patents by either company are directly related to x86. Intel is still one of the most prolific patent recipients though, so one might have to dig through them to see. I suspect they are mostly related to fab design and lithography, though.
It would be microarchitecture, SOC, or commercial application patents. Even one or two critical ones could be good ammo. I doubt Intel or AMD stopped at 1 or 2, though. ;)
Indeed. Here's how the author of the article thinks AMD might skate:
Also not immediately obvious is where this falls under the Intel/AMD x86 cross-licensing agreement. AMD has of course done their own research.... In the meantime and at first glance, because this is a joint venture, it would appear that AMD is in the clear here as they aren’t giving the technology to another business, but rather are using it as part of a new line of products they are developing, albeit in conjunction with an outside firm.
