AMD and Intel’s Feud Heating Up

Things are beginning to get a little ugly between AMD and Intel, but the state of the situation varies depending on who you ask. When AMD first announced plans to open up a new fab with the help of outside companies, Intel had something to say about it immediately. After all, AMD licenses various technologies from Intel, such as x86, and they believe that carrying over this license to the new venture is a breach of contract.

As the story goes, Intel licenses x86 to AMD, and according to them, the license could only be utilized when the company retained a certain structure, and of course, Globalfoundries, is a far cry from AMD’s original fab structure. AMD, however, stresses that there is no breach of contract going on, and that it’s Intel who has breached their own contract by accusing the company of breaching the contract. Whew.

According to AMD, these accusations from Intel are nothing more than an “attempt to distract the world from the global antitrust scrutiny it faces“, but I’m still willing to bet that it’s more the fact that Intel believes the contract was breached. There’s far too much bad publicity to gain from such a move if they’re wrong, so it’s highly unlikely they’re doing this just to divert attention for a while. If this issue is not resolved within two months, Intel is threatening to void AMD’s license immediately, with the help of the courts. It’s doubtful that will happen, but the next two months are going to be extremely interesting.

In our conversation with the company, AMD made a strong distinction between a technology license agreement, in which one company furnishes another with a vital ingredient or special sauce necessary to the function of a product, and a patent license agreement, in which two companies agree not to sue each other for intellectual property (IP) infringement. AMD’s point here is rather simple: AMD neither needs nor receives any technological help from Intel when designing x86 processors. In the event that the cross-license agreement between the two companies were to be canceled, there’s nothing stopping AMD from continuing to build its current products or designing future ones.