Intel Reverse-Engineered AMD64

Ev!L-aLphA

"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."

Source: Neowin

Dom

BS.

Ev!L-aLphA

tell me about it

The_Neon_Cowboy

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snake

Intel has been a very very bad boy on this one
What's next ? A Geforce FX 2 reverse-engineered Radeon Enthusiastic card

Spyro124

Nope, AMD can't do a thing, since Intel used something called a clean box, don't really know what it is, but I do know it's legit, also AMD did the same thing back when it was playing catch up with Intel.

No_Style

I'm glad somebody here can read. It's been happening for years with AMD doing it to Intel, but now that Intel is doing it to AMD, everybody makes a big deal out of it. Pfft! The article was just an informant, but certain people's reaction to it really shows fanboyism.

snuffy

One thing they forgot to mention is that AMD and Intel have an cross technology licensing agreement. Ever wonder how AMD cpus have MMX,SSE,SSE2? These are core features of Intel. If Intel wanted they could have had 3Dnow in there cpus. For all we know they do but it is disabled like the 64-bit part of Prescott. I guess this is the first time that AMD has really produced a stadard that Intel needs/wants to use. It very well could be that AMD gave them the info on thier 64-bit technology. I say congrats to AMD.

The only complaint I have is that Intel is going to use a different name than AMD's. I feel that sucks and will confuse the common consumer.

zerodamage

I think the issue is that Intel isn't creditting AMD with this. They are acting as though everything is their own when in reality they are using AMD on this one and ignoring that fact. That is what I think is pissing off so many people.

mkk

Yeah. And maybe their decision to withold the 64bit capable cores from the consumer market could be a sign that they discovered not being compatible enough, to avoid any major publical embaressment. Pure speculation on my part of course, and I don't really care that much either way. AMD is probably fine with Intel leaving them alone on this small part of the consumer market. Intel isn't really hurting because of that either yet, especially not compared to how their difficulties with keeping up in the priority one 32bit desktop market does.

It makes me wonder a bit though, if the cross licensing deal covers ventures into 64bit designs. Perhaps it doesn't because of it being a too new design path or something. Because if it did, then why wouldn't they be 100% compatible? It seems illogical, Jim.

scobywhru

Well lets not forget that Microsoft told Intel they would not support another consumer level 64bit chip design in the future. So it was either play AMD's game or forget about us supporting it

No_Style

I think in the consumer's point of view... 64-Bit is 64-bit. Go ask an average joe if they know SSE2 isn't supported on AMD XP chips? They most likely didn't know..nor care for that matter. The biggest plus out of all this is plainly this: We have a 64-Bit standard now. How we got to the standard isn't the main concern now, it's how we further develop stuff for it and how we all can finally use this standard.

No_Style

I think there's a few articles explaining that Intel can use AMD's design. It was mentioned a few weeks ago~

Well if you look at the documentation for their respective 64-Bit designs, they're identical except noticeable differences include Intel's SSE3 and HT support..

Thread @ TechSpot

SJae

I think one of the reasons that Intel is changing the name of the AMD64 extension is because it has the world "AMD" inside it. When Intel designed their MMX, SSE2, etc, at least they didn't include the word "Intel" inside those names.

AMD, on the other hand, went out and did so.

I'm sure that if Intel had named their SSE2 as something like IntelSSE2, then AMD might've gone and changed the name too. Wouldn't it be kind of embarrassing to have the name of your competitor inside one of your CPU instruction capabilities?

I don't think Intel is doing anything "wrong" or "bad" by renaming it. It just makes good and practical business sense.

And, as someone mentioned above, AMD has been copying Intel's technologies for years in order to keep pace with Intel. So, what Intel is doing now to AMD is nothing new or shocking.

No_Style

I concur entirely, SJae.

mkk

It was only until fairly recently that the standard was branded anything but X86-64, a very logical name that Intel could have chosen to use as well. The definite move by AMD over to the name AMD64 was also not made until after that Intel publically declared a naming of their own. That press release did of course not mention anything about compatibility with AMD's X86-64, even though everyone knew. Neither that is much cause for grief, but it sure feels a bit silly.

No_Style

If you notice on Intel's site that they completely ignore the competition. I don't think they even recognize that they have competition (at least publicly) You can tell with their on site benchmarks with their various processors. They only show comparisons with themselves. AMD on the other hand recognizes Intel as the competition, which again is shown in their benchmarks on their site.

snuffy

Originally it was called x86-64. I feel they both should adopt that name. It accurately describes what both chips are..... a 64 bit version of the x86 chip design.

I also agree that the fact that the name AMD64 has been used is one reason that Intel opted to use a different name.

Intel does not ignore other competition they smartly talk about themselves not their competition. Be the mark that others are measured by; do not measure yourself by others.

BTW....I sold a Athlon FX system to a certain cpu maker with an "I" in their name. They said they bought it for product comparision.

No_Style

LOL, was it VIA? IBM? I'm silly, yes.

Vampyromaniac

there's no point in these name disputes,

AMD lumped SSE into "3DNow Professional"
Sony called FireWire "i.Link"
Totoya called VTEC "VVTI"
Nabisco called Hydrox "Oreo"

it's always happened, and always will
it's business, not personal