News Analyst: Intel Reverse-Engineered AMD64

Intel copies AMD? This from ExtremeTech:

After investigating the instruction sets used by 64-bit chips from AMD and Intel, an industry analyst has concluded that Intel reverse-engineered the AMD64 instruction set to create its own 64-bit microprocessor architecture.

Tom Halfhill, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR in San Jose, said Monday that he had compared the instruction sets of AMD's 64-bit chips, called AMD64, with the 64-bit extensions to be used in the Intel Xeon processor and future desktop chips. The smoking gun, Halfhill said, was Intel's choice to mimic a decision AMD made in its early Opteron designs, and later reversed.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flatery, don'chaknow... Well, it is until the Lawyers get involved

More on this nice little conspiracy theory here

 

i thought intel bought A64 extensions in exchange for SSE3 or stuff?

 

It makes sense to have compatible instructions anyway, otherwise it would bring on some stupid kind of instruction war, fueled by fanboys.

 

Don't Intel and AMD have a cross-liscensing agreement which enables both companies to share each-others' technology? How else would AMD have access to the SSE instructions, or even be able to make X86 chips at all?

 

they have something along those lines for compatabilities sakes afaik, but things like sse are usually sold a generation behind i think.