Can/Should AMD sue Intel?

If I understand the terms of the last lawsuit settlement, Intel can copy amd technology. Amd copied Intel for years in their infancy.

AMD are whiners

in the 90's, amd often used the same socket intel was using for it's pentium processors!

{Comment Edited by self for being overly sarcastic and not helpful to anyone}

A bit persnickety today...

that went to court and it was asumed you couldn't copyright a number, hence 286, 386 & 486, were made by many companies.
they then switched to Pentium which could be copy righted...
same with sockets, when they swiched to slot1 types.

AMD has no case regarding the IMC against Intel, or for just about any and all processor technologies for that matter

Back in the day, AMD licensed the 8088 ahnd 8086 processors so they could be a second source manufacturer of processors for IBM. Somewhere along the line AMD and Intel signed an agreement for Intel to use AMD's 64bit instruction set for processors. Specifically with the IMC, Intel was going to release the Timna line of processors back in 1999/2000 which had and IMC designed to work with RDRAM. Timna was cancelled due to rambus prices and the lawsuit between rambus and the rest of the world. These are just some examples of the technology that has been shared and/or traded between the two companies over the years, and it isn't likely to change any time soon.

At this stage in the game, Intel cannot live without AMD and AMD cannot live without Intel. They are two sides of the same coin.

You are confusing copyright with trademark. You cannot trademark a number. You CAN, at least in the USA, copyright a number (in the form of software).

At least educate yourself before you post such responses. They'd been working on a memory controller before AMD put out the K8. That IMC was for use with the Tinma System on a chip processor. That was meant to be used in the low end entry level or set top box market. But, AMD has existed since the late 70s, and had a second sourse cross license for the earliest part of their existence. See more below

Yeah, I remember the good old Socket 7 days. In fact thats the main reason Intel started to move away from the copyable socket patents. AMD, Cyrix and a few others had been producing processors that could work on any intel socket based board. AMD K6-2 being the last of the super 7 chips.

Mostly correct, under the current terms of the Cross license neither can sue the other over technology acquired during the last renewal of the license that regards to processor design. If the k8 already existed during the last renewal, then AMD can do Jack squat about them Using an IMC or moving to a HT like bus system.

Tinma's IMC problem was two fold, RDRam was too expensive, and the prices never dropped due to lack of competition for the original maker. And, Intel couldn't get the IMC to work properly with the Memory translator Hub that was needed to allow it to communicate with SDRam at the time, which would allow it to use much cheaper system memory. Actually even though Intel licensed x86-64 from AMD they never used it, they just re-engineered it for themselves and gave it the name IA64 so they wouldn't have to pay AMD royalties.

Yeah I corrected myself in the other thread. IA64 is the 64 bit architecture used for the Itanium that was done by Intel and HP. AMD's response was x86-64 later changed to AMD64, to allow better compatibility and future 64bit path. Intel adapted AMD64 to the Netburst architecture as EM64T, basically the same, but missing one of the multiply or divide I think it was operation commands.

Itanium could emulate x86 through software, but was crappy at it.

http://download.intel.com/museum/r [...] cribed.pdf

If you can tell me, or show me on that die, where there is an integrated memory controller I'll go out of my way to find a way to send you a cookie, even if it's only virtual cookie on an ecard. There were no real memory controllers at the time, the closest thing was a DMA(direct memory access chip). Intel made their own memory chips then, in fact Intel started out making SRAM chips, which tends to be why their cache architecture is faster than AMD's.

I did, there were 3 other add in chips, one for ram, one for IO, and other for ROM. Those were the 4001, 4002 and 4003 chips.

here's more:

http://www.intel4004.com/