Weren't those patents part of the AMD-Intel cross licensing deal or are there so...

monocasa · on April 26, 2018

Those are 1971 IBM patents.

It would be interesting to know anything more on the AMD/Intel agreements than the vague "x86 cross licensing" though for sure.

Moto7451 · on April 27, 2018

https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-and-amd-settle-agree-cro...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...

The first will be a quicker read than the second ;). The other commenter mentioned SMT was an IBM patent rather than an Intel one, so that's probably the answer to my question. It seems weird that they wouldn't have just licensed that from IBM as well.

monocasa · on April 27, 2018

The IBM patents have been expired for decades though. There's nothing to licence.

But that SEC link is awesome; I though the agreement was completely confidential and we'd only ever see it in a historical context. Thanks!

CodeArtisan · on April 26, 2018

Before Ryzen, AMD's CPUs were relying on Cluster-based Multithreading (CMT). you can read more about CMT vs SMT here

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-clu...