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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: golfbum who wrote (226762)	2/23/2007 9:52:15 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 275872

"amd was found to have copied microcode but the instruction set was fair game." That was for the 486. The ruling was fairly confused, and the upshot is that the instruction set was deemed as protected. Hence the cross-licensing and the whole dance over who is authorized to produce x86 compatible processors. What Intel microcode do you think AMD is using these days? The closest thing to microcode being used these days is uops, and the internal machines used by Intel and AMD are vastly different, the number of bits for the uops of the two aren't even the same length. In the current landscape, unless an instruction set is put in the public domain like Sun did with SPARC, you need a license to clone the instruction set. ARM sues all the time over this issue.