and by "hardball" i don't mean they are releasing another faster cpu, they are threatening to yank amd's x86 license:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-x86-cpu,7285.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-x86-cpu,7286.html

for those of you that don't know the x86 instruction set and associated implementations are patented technology that are owned by intel and licensed to various 3rd parties in varying degrees of allowed usage. patents run for 10 years at which time they pass into the public domain (this is different then copyright which currently lasts for about 150 years, if i remember correctly).

up until now amd has been allowed to produce x86 compatible cpu's under a cross licensing agreement which allows any technology developed by one company to be used by the other company after a certain amount of time has passed.

this brings me to the following question: since amd developed x86-64, the 64 bit extensions to the x86 isa, and said extensions are a patented technology owned by amd and licensed to intel via the cross patent licensing agreement, if intel does yank amd's x86 license does that automatically mean that intel's license to produce x86-64 cpu's is also automatically canceled regardless of whether or not amd wishes to void it or not?

in other words, if a license for a given technology becomes null and void does that also invalidate licenses to use technology dependent on the original technology?

personally i don't think intel would yank amd's license out of fear of being accused of anti-competitive monopolistic behavior, but i for sincerely hope that intel follows through on its threat, not because i hate amd and want to see them out of business but because it would be the best thing that ever happened to them.

if intel did in fact yank the x86 license amd would be forced to look for an alternative and one exists, namely the ultra sparc T2 design which sun has released to the open source community under a creative commons license.

amd could start producing chips based on the T2, which is a beast of a cpu (8 core, 8 threads per core, integrated nic, integrated i/o) and to get around the problem of windows and associated software not working on the sparc architecture they could include a small linux based virtual machine within the firmware of supporting motherboards, with proper compilation of said virtual machine and with such a powerful cpu windows software would run very near to full speed if not at full speed.

or perhaps microsoft would be nice enough to release a sparc compatible HAL for windows with a compatibility layer to allow the end user to run x86 compiled software under such a cpu, or perhaps amd could release it's own custom version of linux that runs natively on their hardware.

sometimes what seems like the worst possible thing that can happen to you is actually a blessing in disguise, and i can think of a couple of times in my life when i was fired and it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me.