Who owns x86 architecture

Since deciding to go solo with the in , Intel made it obvious that it would explore every last legal action available to keep AMD out of the x86 microprocessor business.

By , Intel had navigated the arbitration along its long journey up to the Supreme Court of California. However, this result left several outstanding lawsuits unresolved, including a antitrust suit that AMD had brought against Intel in the U. District Court of the Northern District of California. Instead, AMD would develop its own chips in the future. Neither side was happy with this outcome. AMD had missed out on substantial profits during the Intel litigation. AMD had a difficult time securing financing from lenders to build new fabrication plants to keep up with demand.

On the other hand, Intel was forced to let AMD remain in the x86 microprocessor industry. AMD had proven time and time again to be a formidable opponent, despite being a much smaller company.

Furthermore, the computer industry had converged on the x86 architecture, based on the number of computers using x86 microprocessors. Even an industry giant like Intel would not be able to force the computer industry to switch to a new instruction set architecture allowing it to abandon the x86 and AMD. Intel had no choice but to continue competing with AMD in order to maintain its leadership in the microprocessor market.

After settling all of its legal disputes with AMD in , Intel had to compete on the merits of their products and encountered fierce competition from AMD. AMD frequently led Intel in introducing new technologies. AMD often beat Intel in computer performance benchmarks. Accordingly, AMD gained significant market share in retail computer sales beating Intel with But Intel made the compiler compatible with AMD processors as well, thereby encouraging widespread adoption of its compiler and effectively planting a Trojan horse in the software industry.

Naturally, if the Intel compiler was compatible with AMD microprocessors, one would expect it to take advantage of the multimedia extensions in any microprocessor that supported them, be it Intel or AMD. Since many software vendors would compile their programs just once with the Intel compiler, their applications performed better on Intel chips, but only because the multimedia features were artificially disabled for AMD chips.

Despite losing considerable market share to AMD, Intel held on to a commanding lead by exerting its influence on computer manufacturers. Courts had struggled to apply section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act to the issue of bundled discounts, as it was hard to distinguish harmless discounts from loyalty rebates provided for the sole purpose of acquiring or maintaining monopoly power. We are losing the hearts, minds and wallets of our best customers.

But we are not yet there. Now, when it comes to actual intellectual property. There is not just ONE patent for x There is a multitude of patents that were filed over the year as the architecture evolved and was optimised. The latter was introduced in March Some of the old pieces of the x86 architecture patent already expired.

Any patents covering SSE2 will still be in force. SSE3 is even more recent. Not to mention the fused multiply and add operation used on by all current OS which has an Intel patent valid until As you can see, there is quite a bit of patent protecting the current x86 CPUs which prevent any serious competition from entering the market. With the main exception of AMD, which was initially given patent licenses and tolerated to meet 2nd-source requirements.

But even AMD they tried to strongarm out of the market later, leading to litigation where AMD eventually won a bunch of continued patent licenses only as part of the lawsuit settlement.

This processor used the x86 instruction set architecture ISA. The ISA dictates how the processor thinks and executes instructions. So if you're going to make a program or peripheral that works with a specific processor, it has to use the same ISA as the one employed by the CPU. Many software developers and hardware manufacturers created IBM-compatible products because of its popularity and open architecture.

Eventually, IBM clones soon reached the market. After all, Intel developed and owned this technology. Because the IBM PC that used an xbased processor had the majority market share, developers and manufacturers had to make their products compatible with it. And when the market upgrades or buys a new computer, they look for PC-compatible systems because they're used to it. In the early to mids, when an ordinary consumer would buy a computer, their first question was typically, "Is it PC-compatible?

Coupled with the appearance of clone PCs, demand for Intel's x86 chips grew so much the company could not cope with production. That's why they licensed the design to two other companies—Cyrix and AMD. Cyrix once tried to unseat Intel as the processor king with their integer performance processors. However, Intel's floating-point unit processor, known as Pentium, became far more popular. Related: Teraflop vs. Terabyte: What's the Difference?

This led to further market dominance by Intel. However, as AMD quietly manufactured licensed Intel chips, they developed their in-house xbased processor. Then, in , they launched the competing fifth-generation x86 chip dubbed the K5. Although AMD couldn't beat Intel's dominance, at least there was already a viable alternative to what was practically a processor monopoly by Intel. That is until they released the Athlon The Athlon 64 is a processor based on the x86 ISA but uses bits instead of Instead of limiting itself to 32 calculations per clock cycle, it doubled that to More than that, this bit technology also increased the maximum memory it can handle by a square.