AMD tops Nvidia in graphics chip shipments

[energyman]

true, but they still have patents and licences. Nvidia has neither.

[deanjo]

true, but they still have patents and licences. Nvidia has neither.

The patents went with the sales IIRC and the license has expired.

[deanjo]

Also it depends on the features one wants as to who gets a piece of the pie. A x86 chip could only require a license from intel. A x86-64 chip however would require a license as well from AMD. One from Via would only really be required if you desired to implement such additional features like Padlock.

[deanjo]

The other thing to remember as well is many of the patents are coming upon their expiry date. Anything found in a 486 and older has its patents expired already and patents for the pentium and MMX are soon to follow. Patents before June 8 / 1995 have a 17 year limit any thing after that has a 20 year limit.

[energyman]

copyright has no such short term expiration period ... and even if you can make a pentium mmx equivalent - what do you get? Some very slow, very outdated, very power hungry (in terms of performace/watt) CPU.

[deanjo]

copyright has no such short term expiration period ... and even if you can make a pentium mmx equivalent - what do you get? Some very slow, very outdated, very power hungry (in terms of performace/watt) CPU.

WTH does copywrite have to do with it? It's not like they would advertise a x86 chip as a "Pentium".

[energyman]

well, I don't think that you can patent something like SSE2/3/4. But you can have a copyright...

[deanjo]

well, I don't think that you can patent something like SSE2/3/4. But you can have a copyright...

Actually it is the other way around. SSE2/3/4 are instruction sets ion the hardware and are patented, not copywrited. Copywrites apply to written word (or code).

[kazetsukai]

Whether these patents would hold up in court against a hybrid or emulation technology where the chip would convert x86(_64) instructions to native hardware instructions has yet to be seen. That would be a good way to "break out" of x86- you can write apps as you have up until now, or if you want extra performance, write everything in OpenCL, CUDA, or for the chip's native instruction set.

[deanjo]

Transmeta would be the best example of hybrid/emulation technology holding up against any infringement (not to mention the many emulators out there). Intel couldn't touch them but transmeta on the otherhand was able to successfully sue intel for various power saving techniques to which they held patents on.