If I recall correctly, they were also licensed to produce some clones.
I remember when in the early 90s the am386-40MHz came out. Everyone was freaking out how we are now breaking the sound barrier. There was a company Twinhead(?) that came out with these 386-40Mhz motherboards with buses so overclocked most video cards would fry. Only the mono Hercules cards could survive. We thought our servers were the shizzle.
Intel did indeed later license AMD to produce some clones, but it was not due to their good heart, but those were cross-licensing deals, with AMD producing clones of some Intel chips and Intel producing clones of some AMD chips, which could be used as peripherals for the Intel CPUs.
Then there was the big licensing deal for Intel 8088 and its successors, which was forced by IBM upon Intel, in order to have a second source for the critical components of the IBM PC.
Weren't legal protections for semiconductor masks rather lax in the 70s, at least in the United States? You might need certain patent licenses for the manufacturing process, but the chip itself was largely unprotected.
> "In the summer of 1973, during their last day working at Xerox, Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey, and Jay Kumar took detailed photos of an Intel 8080 pre-production sample"
> "Xerox being more of a theoretical company than a practical one let us spend a whole year taking apart all of the different microprocessors on the market at that time and reverse engineering them back to schematic. And the final thing that I did as a project was to, we had gotten a pre-production sample of the Intel 8080 and this was just as Kim and I were leaving the company. On the last day I took the part in and shot ten rolls of color film on the Leica that was attached to the lights microscope and then they gave us the exit interview and we went on our way. And so that summer we got a big piece of cardboard from the, a refrigerator came in and made this mosaic of the 8080. It was about 300 or 400 pictures altogether and we pieced it together, traced out all the logic and the transistors and everything and then decided to go to, go up North to Silicon Valley and see if there was anybody up there that wanted to know about that kind of technology. And I went to AMI and they said oh, we're interested, you come on as a consultant, but nobody seemed to be able to take the project seriously. And then I went over to a little company called Advanced Micro Devices and they wanted to, they thought they'd like to get into it because they had just developed an N-channel process and this was '73. And I asked them if they wanted to get into the microprocessor business because I had schematics and logic diagrams to the Intel 8080 and they said yes."
From today's perspective, just shopping a design lifted directly from Intel CPU die shots around to valley semi companies sounds quite remarkable but it was a very different time then.
That wasn't the first time they had similar products out-speeding Intel. I have the CPU from the first PC I owned tacked to the front of my current main PC with a Ryzen. That was clocked at 20MHz IIRC (I'm at parental home ATM so can't confirm) where the Intel units topped out at 12MHz (unless overclocked, or course).
I'm guessing that was a 286. I think Intel parts topped out at 12.5 MHz but AMD and Harris eventually reached 20 or even 25 MHz. I still have my original PC with a 12.5 MHz one.
The difference with the 386, I think, is that AFAIK the second-sourced 8086 and 286 CPUs from non-Intel manufacturers still made use of licensed Intel designs. The 386 (and later) had to be reverse engineered again and AMD designed their own implementation. That also meant AMD was a bit late to the game (the Am386 came out in 1991 while the 80386 had already been released in 1985) but, on the other hand, they were able to achieve better performance.
> The 386 (and later) had to be reverse engineered … That also meant AMD was a bit late to the game
There were also legal matters that delayed the release of their chips. Intel tried to claim breach of copyright with the 80386 name¹ and so forth, to try stymie the competition.
> they were able to achieve better performance.
A lot of that came from clocking them faster. I had an SX running at 40Hz. IIRC they were lower power for the same clock then Intel parts, able to run at 3.3V, which made them popular in laptops of the time. That, and they were cheaper! Intel came out with a 3.3V model that had better support for cache to compete with this.
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[1] This failed, which is part of why the i386 (and later i486 and number-free names like Pentium) branding started (though only in part - starting to market direct to consumers rather than just EOMs was a significant factor in that too).
AMD didnt clean room 386, nor even 486. AMD directly copied Intel microcode 100% 1:1 for 386, and later admitted to copying parts for 486 (smm? ice?). Sept. 4, 1993 LA Times article:
>AMD said Friday that its “independently derived” 486 microprocessor borrowed some microcode from Intel’s earlier 386 chip.
Borrowed hehe. Ended up in a 1995 settlement where AMD fully admitted copying and agreed to pay $58mil penalty in exchange for official license to 386 & 486 microcodes and infamous patent 338(mmu). Intel really wanted a legal win confirming validity of their patent 338 to threaten other competitors. 338 is what prevented sale of UMC Green 486 in USA. Cyrix bypassed the issue by manufacturing at SGS and TI who had full Intel license https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/8...
>were able to achieve better performance
Every single Am386 instruction executes at same cycle count as Intel counterpart, difference is only official ability to work at 40MHz.
100% agree. It's clearest to see in China. IP has been transformed from a mechanism to maintain competition and into a mechanism to maintain market control.
Given that market control is one of the few ultimate gating factors that makes you thrive or die as a company, it’s no surprise that anything that could be used as a mechanism to maintain market control would be.
Moral: Awesome productivity happens when IP doesn't get in the way.