| Alby_da_Wolf said: It's a cross-licensing agreement: one of Intel's big advantages is that without its patents, AMD ones are useless. Also, if Intel eventually accepted an agreement with such a weak company as AMD is, it would probably do the same with a bigger and stronger one. Admitting that a new agreement be necessary after the one reached in 2009, that actually solved AMD problem with keeping on using the cross-licensed patents even after splitting from its foundries: we don't know all its details, but Intel probably had its reasons for both suing AMD and eventually settle with it, most probably Intel wants that the use of those patents can't be automatically transmitted to other companies, but that it can be done only under strict conditions. Basically the effect of those conditions is that only AMD can sell the CPUs made under that agreement, a third competitor, even if it were AMD's hypothetical new parent company, couldn't get those licenses transfered by AMD, but it should reach a new agreement directly with Intel to produce and sell x86 CPUs through another of its controlled companies different from AMD. Also, AMD is a public company, Intel reached an agreement with it, not separated agreements with its shareholders: should the latter change, the agreement would stand as long as its terms were still respected by AMD as a whole. What could change is the will of the new majority shareholders to keep on respecting the agreement, but why should they. |
You wouldn't know if Intel will license it's x86 technology to the hypothetical AMD's parent company. What if Intel decides to keep it for themselves ? Back in the day AMD wasn't so weak when they first made the agreement about sharing the patents towards x86 technologies. In the end Intel got their license to the 64 bit extension of x86 whereas AMD was allowed to get future x86 extenstions like SSE and AVX. That dispute in 2009 had to do with the fact that under the original contract AMD couldn't outsource the manufacturing of x86 CPU's to globalfoundries but it was settled in the end.
