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by CodeArtisan 2581 days ago
And the expiration of a few patents, like the ones about simultaneous multithreading. Zen is the first AMD's architecture to implement SMT, Bulldozer had CMT (https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.j...).

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138

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

1 comments

Don't Intel and AMD have a fairly comprehensive patent cross-licensing agreement?

Not sure if SMT parents would fall under that, but it was my impression that AMD was relatively unconstrained wrt Intel patents due to this agreement.

The agreement can be read here https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...

I would say that only the Instruction set is cross licensed, implementation techniques and hardware interfaces aren't (AMD CPUs shall not be compatible with Intel sockets, for example). Intel's SMT is known as hyper-threading, the patent has expired too but the name "hyper-threading" is still copyright protected and the property of Intel.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5361337A/en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#History