Comment by moyta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moyta | Hacker News Reader

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Eh, AMD has been doing that and custom cores as their bread and butter, seeing as they design the chips that power all the >$100 consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, they have a good market niche that provides them with a decent market to keep the company viable.

I'm not sure of cracking a new market space would be a good idea either, just like how they aren't trying to go toe to toe with Allwinner offering H3 SOCs for $1ea with a quadcore and H.265 hardware decoding, it might not make sense to get into a 3 way war with Intel, Nvidia, etc.

Retaking or getting into another market with a single vendor or none presently would likely be more profitable, just as VIA did with their point of sale motherboards with crypto accelerators and tons of serial ports.

AMD only has so much money and talent, getting into a pissing contest is not something they are looking to do. Intel can piss harder and longer than them (just look at the contra-revenue they did with the HP Stream 7 and the $50 Walmart android tablet, Intel charged the manufacturer for the chip $X and paid them $X+Y for using said chip to compete with ARM).

The console business has razor-thin margins, there's not enough money being made there to sustain a company the size of AMD. Where that business might save them is if say Microsoft decided to buy them out to secure their supply of chips for the Xbox. The fact that it would force Sony to look elsewhere for their next-gen console wouldn't hurt I'm sure.

Sure, I'm not saying its something with huge margins, just like how Allwinner isn't getting rich with their dirt cheap SOCs. That being said, they have a few markets like that, and that is what sustains a company.

I highly doubt Microsoft or anyone will buy AMD, as it would not make financial sense, AMD already builds these chips cheaper than any of them could build them on their own, and any kind of merger would revoke AMD's x86 license, and Intel's x86-64 license, thus destroying the ecosystem.

On another note, a razor thin margin might not be glamorous, but you can run a business like that, though it will not be glamorous.

Please fact check at the very least.

> and any kind of merger would revoke AMD's x86 license, and Intel's x86-64 license, thus destroying the ecosystem.

is known to be materially false.

Uhh, have fun with that belief, AMD's lawyers say otherwise:

http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clari...

I'm not a lawyer, nor have I studied the contract, but a superficial reading would imply that complete revocation is indeed the outcome of acquisition of either party. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

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

  5.2 (c)	Termination Upon Change of Control. Subject to 
  the terms of, and as further set forth in, Sections 5.2(d) 
  and 5.2(e), this Agreement shall automatically terminate as 
  a whole upon the consummation of a Change of Control of 
  either Party.

  (d)	Effects of Termination.
  	(ii)	In the event of any termination of this   
  Agreement pursuant to Section 5.2(c), and subject to the 
  provisions of Section 5.2(e), the rights and licenses 
  granted to both Parties under this Agreement, including 
  without limitation the rights granted under Section 3.8(d), 
  shall terminate as of the effective date of such   
  termination.

He doesn't, hence why he did not link to an article where AMD, Intel or VIA's lawyers say their cross licensing agreement allows them to be bought by another company.

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.

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.

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