[Qwertious]

This is true but irrelevant - it's Mutually Assured Destruction unless they reaffirm the contract, since both AMD and Intel would literally have to stop producing x86_64 chips without it. There is no way that Intel would allow that, their business would go into freefall.

I mean, even if they did manage to wreck AMD, it doesn't get them anything particularly useful if it costs them their x86_64 duopoly/monopoly.

[emn13]

Not to mention that AMD's current state is absolutely perfect for intel - too weak to be a serious threat, yet viable enough so that Intel is not a completely obvious monopoly that might attract unwanted regulatory intervention.

Even if the licensing problems went away, I'm not sure it's in Intels political/legal interests to lose their only plausible competitor. AMD can't be costing them a lot of money (the real risk is slow irrelevance if ARM usage grows any more), and the risks were AMD to cease operations considerable.

That is, until some ARM-based system can at least appear competitive enough to keep justice departments (and powerful negotiating partners like apple) at bay.