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AMD to License Chip Technologies

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

June 2, 2006, 5:03 PM

In a surprising announcement, AMD said Friday that it had plans to allow third parties to license some of its processor technologies. The deal would allow these companies to produce chips that would add features to its own.

Intel, on the other hand, manufacturers its own accessory chips for the most part. Giving its partners more access, could aid AMD in its continuing battle for market share with Intel, analysts say. The second place chipmaker has recently made great strides to level the playing field.

The accessory chips would be able to plug into the same socket as AMD microprocessors. Thus, if a motherboard had space for two sockets, one could be used for the CPU, while the other could be used for the accessory chip, such as one to enhance graphics.

The company has seen success over the past year, especially since it started tinkering with its chip designs. The result has been an increase in market share, and AMD has succeeded in giving the impression to investors that rival Intel is too complacent in both its market position and overall strategy.

AMD plans to focus on multi-core processors, as well as making its chips more energy efficient. Both strategies will appear in new CPUs for server and desktop applications in the middle of next year, and for laptops in the second half of 2007.

News of AMD's plans to open up its processor technology first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

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By utomo

posted Jun 5, 2006 - 2:22 AM

We will see a chap but good processor, when China Manufacturer buy the license and manufacture in bulk.

Score: 0

By aredo

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 11:28 AM

Cyrix anyone ?

Score: 0

By spiked

posted Jun 5, 2006 - 2:37 AM

Where have you been? Many years ago, in order to survive a lawsuit by Intel, Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor which wound up ditching the CPU market. The Cyrix engineers all left, and the empty shell of a company named Cyrix was eventually sold to VIA which abandoned the brand name. Although VIA still owns the cyrix.com domain registration, they don't even bother to redirect it to their own site or post a historical page; it simply goes to a Network Solutions parking page. Cyrix is clearly dead dead dead.

On the other hand, this brings up an interesting point: I think VIA may be in the best position of any company to take advantage of AMD's offer. We're not talking about simple support chips like you might get from a small outfit like Realtek or Winbond; we're talking about something that will run alongside mid-range to high-end CPUs. At an absolute minimum, this is going to require the kind of engineering, foundry, and other resources that it currently takes to produce mobo chipsets for x86-based architectures. Obviously, we can rule out Intel. There might be some opportunity here for ATI and nVidia but I wonder if those guys have resources to spare right now. That just leaves VIA and a few little guys like SiS. Among them, VIA is the only one who has EVER designed AND manufactured an x86 CPU, giving them a clear advantage. (IBM and others have manufactured x86 CPUs but using Intel's designs; HP, Motorola, Sun, and TI have designed and manufactured CPUs of comparable complexity but distinctly different architecture.)

Score: 0

By Killerz

edited Jun 5, 2006 - 7:12 AM

Via is not the only company with an x86 chip. What about Transmeta and their Efficeon chip which uses extremely low power. They recently introduced a new version. They may be in an even better position to take advantage of this AMD offer. Microsoft just delivered a reference board with Efficeon for their FlexGo project. Looks like they are still alive and getting stronger in a quiet sort of way doing the licensing of their own power saving technology called LongRun2.

Score: 0

By xprizex

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 10:50 AM

AMD, boma ye! AMD, boma ye! AMD, boma ye! LOL

Score: 0

By anmol.2k4

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 1:18 AM

YAY.
that is why i love amd more than poor intel. ;)
Intel is THE better/best in manufacturing (in biz world), volumes, brand cash etc etc
but dunno why i still like amd lot more,

maybe because my pc is running soo coool in this scorching heat (~34)

or maybe because of the thing they do ;)

Score: 0

By smpita

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 11:27 PM

I've been a die hard AMD fan since their first decent processor (K6, especially the K6III series!) and the only thing left to say is... I love you AMD.

Score: 0

By cozappz

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 5:09 AM

well, there are out there AMD die-hard fans since Am586 and you know why!

Score: 0

By Kramy

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 8:32 PM

This has a lot more implications than mentioned here. I read all about it yesterday on different sites.

This seems to be part of AMD's 4x4 plan - to have a 4 socket motherboard with quad-core processors in the near future. Opening up the Hyper-Transport bus is apparently highly beneficial, since it allows processors to skip the operating system entirely for various operations. Since each CPU has its own memory controller, this would be ideal for AI/Physics cards, as someone mentioned.

There's also rumours that AMD is developing some sort of "reverse-HT", which allows multi-core processors to emulate a single-core one. In theory, it could allow a quad-core processor to attain performance of roughly 4-5x Intel's single-core counterparts, when dealing with single threads. That would totally cream anything Intel can come up with, but don't get your hopes up incase the last part turns out untrue. :P

Score: 0

By TanNg

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 9:44 PM

Oh, I love the idea of reverse-HT. Now you have powerfull PC withough waiting for OS and application to support multi-core processor s.

Good sceanario is running WindowXP and old applications on 4X4 that emulates 2 cores.

Score: 0

By aredo

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 11:33 AM

HyperTransport already fails miserabily in 4-sockets configs. It has some serious issues with dual-core CPUs on the bus, you can only wonder what could happen with quad-core CPUs .. 4 of them on 4 sockets for 16 cores overall..
HyperTransport 3.0 won't help much either. That's the main reason why IBM and Sun architectures are still top-notch when compared to AMD and Intel in the high-segment market.

"reverse-HyperThreading" it's just marketing hype. If it could be done do you really think that IBM,Sony and Toshiba wouldn't have implemented that already on Cell for the PS3 in the first place ? They wouldn't have had so many issues with developers having an hard time at writing code for the complex multi-core CPU, indeed.

Score: 0

By hondaman

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 7:00 PM

I'd love to see some hard data backing your claim that HT "fails miserabily in 4-sockets configs"

I seriously wonder where some people read their "facts"

Score: 0

By The Man

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 2:18 PM

""reverse-HyperThreading" it's just marketing hype. If it could be done do you really think that IBM,Sony and Toshiba wouldn't have implemented that already on Cell for the PS3 in the first place "

well, someone has to think of these things
AMD has quite a number of unique ideas
don't knock them for trying something no one else has

and what the hell are you talking about regarding the HT bus?
it easily handles multiple cores
they may need to impliment a couple mods to handle 8 - 16 cores, but i have no doubt they'll do a good job of it

maybe you could back up your claims?

Score: 0

By Galway

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 8:12 PM

Plug in a PowerPC and run mac stuff ..... maybe not.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

edited Jun 3, 2006 - 10:25 AM

lmao...

Now *that* would be hilarious.

Score: 0

By The Man

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 5:43 PM

now this is a good idea
:-)

can't wait to see what kind of co-processors come out for the two socket motherboards

kudos AMD

Score: 0

By Grazer

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 7:15 PM

I predict Physics and AI coprocessors for the consumer end...graphics are thoroughly entrenched(sp?) as expansion cards.

Either that or, ACK!!!, DRM coprocessors

Score: 0

By Banquo

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 8:02 PM

I doubt that would work; a coprocessor is optional and I can't imagine anyone in their right mind buying and adding DRM chips to their system.

Score: 0

By smarterthanyou

posted Jun 3, 2006 - 2:29 AM

Trusted Platform Module maybe?

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 2, 2006 - 5:28 PM

Heh..

The deal would allow these companies to produce chips that would add features to its own.

They like Firefox so much, their going to allow extensions on their CPU.

Take *that* Intel!

Score: 0

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