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Comment by CuriousCosmic | Hacker News Reader

What do they do that Nvidia doesn't (and that Nvidia would care about)?

They already do networking, photonics, GPUs, high speed interconnects, and CPUs. They are planning on selling their FPGAs (the Altera acquisition) to Lattice.

The only things left are their fab ops, thunderbolt/usbc, wifi, and ble.

Their fab ops would take over a decade of heavy investment to catch up to TSMC or Samsung and idk if even Nvidia is ambitious enough to take that on.

Wifi and BLE could be good additions if they wanted to branch out their mellanox portfolio to wireless. Thunderbolt/USB C also might be worthwhile.

But that IP is probably going to be cheaper to buy piecemeal so idk if it's worth it to buy the whole company outright.

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I mean, ARM designs have had some wins lately, but x86 still does quite well in single-thread performance, right? Excluding Apple, because they are magic—Amazon, Ampere, these ARM CPUs make a reasonable pitch for applications that use lots of cores well, but that isn’t every application.

x86 CPUs.

Yeah I wonder if maybe the x86 license is the most valuable art of Intel at this point...

X86 cores remain pretty good at branchy, lightly threaded codes, right?

Unfortunately rights to the x86_64 license expire on the event of transfer of either company to a new owner.

License for what? The patents have expired.

For the old stuff maybe, but they keep adding new stuff. AVX is from 2008, AVX2 from 2013.

How do you know those are encumbered? Intel invented them, after all....

The colliquial "x86 License" is the AMD-Intel Patent cross-licensing agreement. i.e. All patents related to x86 or any extensions of the ISA are automatically cross-licensed between the companies. While in the past the ISA patent story mostly was leaning in Intel's favor, since AMD64/x86_64 really took off, ISA innovation really became a delicate stack of cards interwoven between Intel and AMD.

So if Intel sells, everyone is fucked until whoever buys can renegotiate the terms of the agreement. And if that's Nvidia, they could just sit dead on the IP and starve AMD of the bulk of their CPU revenue (which is what is keeping the company solvent). And requiring they keep the agreement they currently have would mean requiring AMD to give Nvidia a pretty detailed look at the AMD secret sauce which would increasingly push AMD into the red until they become insolvent, again leading to a Nvidia monopoly.

The US government as well as the EU will not allow that to happen so however things slice, ownership of the x86 ISA patents would not be going to Nvidia.

So for the 2009 cross licensing agreement, change of control terminates the cross licensing for both parties[0]. Since there are far more Intel x86 patents in the last 20 years than AMD, sounds like AMD would be the one more at risk, which I think agrees with what you say. In practice, any anti-trust review if Nvidia is the buyer would prevent Nvidia from using it to harm AMD's business.

[0]https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...

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