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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (66087)	7/19/1999 2:54:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1585123

rEF- <show off your comprehension, so we could understand of what was "clean room implemented" and what was just a necessity to make AMD chips formally compatible to x86. > I am neither a lawyer, nor a Microprogrammer, but I will do my best to explain to the thread. The Copying of chip design and layout is not allowed by Copyright laws. Copying of programs is also not allowed by copyright laws. The courts had ruled that copying of Microcode is also protected by copy right laws. What is Microcode ? Microcode transaltes the instructions given by the programeer to a more primitive (or lower level )set of instructions, which deal with movement of information between register fields, flags, or hidden registers etc. AMD did not copy the layout design of the Intel 486. However they claimed that the AMD Microcode was a "clean room implementation" and thus should be exempt from the copyright protection. What AMD claimed was that their engineers were totally unaware of the Intel Microcode, and the AMD engineers independently came up with their Microcode. Any Micrcode resemblance, if any ,was due to the fact that there was only "one and only one way " to make the AMD chip compatible with Intel 486. It was demonstrated in court that multiple alternatives existed to the Intel Microcode. However in all instances the AMD code was identical to the Intel Microcode. That could not be a coincidence! The court agreed with Intel. However the AMD management had repeatedly told its shareholders and the world that the AMD Microcode was a clean room implementation. There were a dozen of shareholder suits, and AMD had to pay off a large number of people. The Intel- AMD litigation also got to be a real mess and eventually Intel and AMD settled out of court.