| Soleron said: Intel alleges that AMD broke the terms of the x86 cross-licensing agreement by spinning off its manufacturing division into Globalfoundries, and says if the dispute is not resolved then AMD's rights under the agreement will be terminated in 60 days. AMD will no longer be able to design or produce Intel-compatible CPUs. Short version: AMD will die in 60 days. This is very, very bad. If AMD cannot manufacture CPUs then they will likely cease to exist (their graphics division will likely be sold off) and Intel will have a >99% share of the desktop CPU market, i.e. a monopoly. The dispute stems from the excat wording of the agreement. Though it is not public, it is said to forbid AMD manufacturing over a certain percentage of its processors externally. The issue is whether Globalfoundries counts as a subsidiary or not, as AMD has less than a 50% stake in the company but equal voting rights with the Abu Dhabi owned ATIC. http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16585 http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090316corp.htm |
Who cares? AMD are all but finished anyway. They're basically 2 years behind intel in tech right now and that gap will only widen. They were finished after socket939. You can hang on all you like. But they don't have anything to compete with the Core i7 even at the high end of their line. So your monopoly idea carries no weight.
I'm quite happy to pay £220 for a 2.66Ghz Core i7 920 that clocks to 4Ghz...Indeed, I have and the performance it offers for its main task (video encoding) blows anything AMD can offer out the water even at it's highest end.
Further, I wouldn't worry too much about ATI. It was AMD who fucked up ATI in the first place when it bought them out, they caught the "AMD" bug of producing nothing of interest even after long periods of time. ATI aren't doing too badly now but they don't have the fastest cards at the moment and they have no new tech in the pipeline there either. If AMD goes under then it won't mean anything bad for ATI at all.
