Not according to the courts. Intel told AMD what they wanted AMD to work on. AMD delivered the completed designs, to which Intel said, "No thanks, we're going with designs developed internally." The courts ruled that in rejecting valid designs that Intel had initially assigned to AMD, Intel had dealt in bad faith.
BTW, the bad blood between Intel and AMD predates the IBM PC. Intel tried their best to avoid giving a second source contract to AMD. Unfortunately, Motorola had them boxed in. For IBM to commit to the 8088, Intel had to engage a second source. First they went with NEC, which wasn't good enough for IBM because they wanted a domestic second source. Then they provided Harris Semiconductors with the design specification, from which Harris could design their own implementation of the 8088. This also wasn't good enough for IBM, who insisted on a manufacturer with sufficient capacity to service the entire market, and that Intel provide the masks to this manufacturer.
Unfortunately for Intel, TI was in a second source agreement with Nat. Semi., Zilog had their own problems, and Motorola had given out second source agreements for the 68000 to almost anybody who walked in the door. The only US manufacturer that was interested was AMD, who had only a second source agreement with Zilog. Thus, Intel reluctantly signed AMD up as a second source, and attempted to find a way out of this agreement before the ink was dry. |
