What amazes me is how many lawsuits there were over the terms of Intel's technology sharing agreements with other companies.
... did they just have really shitty lawyers? Why were the terms so ambiguous that it led to a decade of court battles?
Like why is it even a question whether their agreement covered the 287. why didn't they spell out exactly what it covered.
they just gave a license to AMD for "Intel Microcodes" and just left that hanging there. what does that mean?
I am not even a lawyer and I realize how stupid that was
It sounds like Intel thought they were just giving AMD a license to the microcode that they had written to that point, but accidentally gave them a perpetual microcode license which allowed them to continue legally reverse-engineering every Intel chip.
It's crazy to think about the fact that AMD probably only exists today because Intel's lawyers were high on cocaine and couldn't write a proper contract
no wonder Intel partnered with Harris for the 80c286 design considering they were suing AMD at the same time. That would have been an awkward date.
anyway I didn't own an AMD 80c287 but now i do
Be sure to read the installation manual
you know i didn't even check to see what was installed in my AT
Nov 11, 2026, 4:05 PM@gloriouscow you can never have enough chips :3
Nov 11, 2026, 1:29 AM@gloriouscow I was told the reason was that Intel couldn't trademark a number. When they released the Pentium to overcome that AMD already had a strong foothold on the market...
@dermoth right. they were annoyed with the clone '386' and '486' chips.
Pentium was a brilliant brand name though, so that was definitely a good call
The start of the Pentium1 was bumpy because of the in-house concurrent i486dx4 processor and later the PSN (pentium serial number) totally backfired.
@gloriouscow Do you know if the meaning of 'intel microcodes' in 1976 would match the contemporary one; or would it have been much less clear at the time whether they were talking about what we mean by 'microcode' or whether that was more of an ISA license?
That conceptual distinction would definitely have come early enough; but I don't know what the state of the terminology was.
@fuzzyfuzzyfungus i'm trying to find the actual verbiage of the 1976 patent agreement
here we go:
https://www.ardent-tool.com/CPU/docs/MPR/19920708/060901.pdf
seems they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble by adding "...Written before 1977" to that clause
another possibility is that they actually did intend to grant AMD a perpetual license in the first place but then tried to weasel out of it.
AMD was an official second-source manufacturer for the 8088 and 80286 so it clearly wasn't a problem for those particular chips
@gloriouscow I wonder if there were some real iAPX 432 optimists involved.
The contract still seems weirdly vague; but that seems like the least baffling explanation for why they might have seen a fairly broad license to AMD as strategically narrow in 1976; only later attempting to make it explicit that, even if x86 had turned out not to be temporary, AMD was still supposed to be.
it's interesting that it points out that the agreement predates the 8088 which was the first intel CPU to even contain microcode, so perhaps it wasn't even on their radar.
AMD didn't have to copy the 8088 and 80286 as they were second-source manufacturers and so Intel just gave them the die masks, everything soured when AMD wanted to make a 287 which for whatever reason Intel hadn't hired them to produce
@fuzzyfuzzyfungus the whole second-source CPU thing was, from what I understand, an external requirement of IBM, who wanted to make sure there was not going to be supply issues getting CPUs for their PC products.
@gloriouscow All of Intel's mental energy was spent on reducing the pin count of the packages. save a pin, add twenty extra support chips