Why cant AMD make replicas of intel?

[rukspuks]

I mean Intel has already produced reasonable cpus, what is the reason for creating a whole new architecture? AMD has done this in the past FYI.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Because patents are a thing. 

 

Intel and AMD (and Nvidia, and Qualcomm and every other chip maker) take ideas and technologies from each other, but they can't just copy or they'll get sued to hell. 

[rukspuks]

5 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Because patents are a thing. 

 

Intel and AMD (and Nvidia, and Qualcomm and every other chip maker) take ideas and technologies from each other, but they can't just copy or they'll get sued to hell. 

Why was then AMD not sued before?

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, rukspuks said:

Why was then AMD not sued before?

Re-watch the video, Linus says right at the beginning that Intel and AMD made a license-agreement.

[Oshino Shinobu]

5 minutes ago, rukspuks said:

Why was then AMD not sued before?

Well, in the video you linked, Linus explains that Intel and AMD came to an agreement on it. It's not like Intel just let it go without doing anything, they just made AMD a secondary maker/source for redundancy purposes. That was back when the market was still very new. Now days, if a company copies another company's patented design, they get sued. We see it all the time. 

[rukspuks]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

Re-watch the video, Linus says right at the beginning that Intel and AMD made a license-agreement.

Yes, so they can do it now? cant they? Even when intel stopped supplying sources code they did it.

[rukspuks]

4 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Well, in the video you linked, Linus explains that Intel and AMD came to an agreement on it. It's not like Intel just let it go without doing anything, they just made AMD a secondary maker/source for redundancy purposes. That was back when the market was still very new. Now days, if a company copies another company's patented design, they get sued. We see it all the time. 

So patents dont apply to AMD and hence they can which is what I'm saying

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, rukspuks said:

Yes, so they can do it now? cant they? Even when intel stopped supplying sources code they did it.

You really should rewatch the video, this question is also answered right at the beginning; AMD has a license to use the x86 instruction-set, but they no longer get direct schematics from Intel, so they have to design their own CPUs.

[rukspuks]

Just now, WereCatf said:

You really should rewatch the video, this question is also answered right at the beginning; AMD has a license to use the x86 instruction-set, but they no longer get direct schematics from Intel, so they have to design their own CPUs.

Yes please watch they already copied 386 even when Intel stopped supplying the secondary source. If you cant, I can give you from and to timings.

[Oshino Shinobu]

2 minutes ago, rukspuks said:

So patents dont apply to AMD and hence they can which is what I'm saying

No. AMD has licensing to use the x86 instruction set. If AMD outright copied one of Intel's modern architectures, they'd be sued. 

[rukspuks]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

No. AMD has licensing to use the x86 instruction set. If AMD outright copied one of Intel's modern architectures, they'd be sued. 

They copied i386

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, rukspuks said:

They copied i386

Yes, they did. Intel didn't see it worth it to actually go to court at the time and instead just threatened AMD with it, so AMD went on to develop K5 and haven't produced exact clones of Intel's stuff since then.

[Oshino Shinobu]

3 minutes ago, rukspuks said:

They copied i386

In 1985, right after Intel stopped giving them the chip designs and when they were hardly their own company. Also, it's not like AMD can't copy Intel, or vice versa. They could do it, but they run the risk of being sued for it. It's up to the one that was copied to actually do the suing. 

 

The market has changed a lot since 1985. Qualcomm, for example, can't use the x86 instruction set. If they did, they'd be sued like crazy. 

[Dash Lambda]

Why would you want them to copy Intel anyway?

Intel's chips are slightly faster in single-threaded tasks, but AMD's modular approach is a huge advantage in terms of yields and scalability. Both have very unique and different ways to solve problems, and it's great that they're going about it in their own ways because that means we're not stuck with what one or the other thinks is right.

[rukspuks]

1 hour ago, Dash Lambda said:

Why would you want them to copy Intel anyway?

Intel's chips are slightly faster in single-threaded tasks, but AMD's modular approach is a huge advantage in terms of yields and scalability. Both have very unique and different ways to solve problems, and it's great that they're going about it in their own ways because that means we're not stuck with what one or the other thinks is right.

In SC performance, there isn't a single AMD chip in the top 30 of userbenchmarks.

[EsaT]

If AMD were carbon coying Intel CPUs they would be as full of Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities.

Patching all the holes of Intel's speculative code execution system has actually caused notable performance penalty for Intel in server type loads.

 

And earlier NetBurst/Pentium 4 was similar scale failure as Bulldozer.

AMD actually had completely superior architecture at that time.

 

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective

[Coaxialgamer]

Let's imagine for a second that AMD could legally sell copies of Intel's current x86 chips , as they did with the 386 and 486 .

 

How did AMD copy the 486 ? They reverse-engineered it , meaning they took a close picture of the CPU die , figured out what all the different parts did and how they were laid out, and from that they mapped transistors onto silicon and made their own identical microprocessor .

 

The problem with that approach , for starters , is innate to reverse engineering : AMD would have to WAIT for Intel to release their chip before they could start development of a clone . This was already a bit of a problem in the 80's , but AMD could carve themselves a niche by overclocking the chips and selling them for cheaper. AMD had released cheaper 486 chips at high frequencies , but those came years after Intel ,who was already releasing the Pentium. That strategy simply isn't viable anymore due to the volumes required for profitability. With modern chips being so complex , it could take AMD half a decade to reverse engineer a chip like skylake , and by then it would already be obsolete. And that's not even counting the time to port skylake to another , non-intel process. How will the 6700k be doing in 2021 ? Yeah , not so hot. And AMD won't even be able to run it any faster than intel's 2015 implementation.

 

And that's IF they could ever reverse-engineer it : modern chips are so complex and so dense that getting detailed information on the architecture using die shots would be nigh impossible . There'd be so much guesswork given the limited architectural info Intel gives out that the final architecture would be quite different , but would not benefit from any technological advancements made over the years .

[Tellos]

Also note these two oly recently stopped goign through a lawsuit war for the better part of a decade back and forth. So nobody wants to start that again,