Leonardo Rodrigues wrote:
Quote:
However, AMD believes that it will not morph into another Intel: "Our
approach is very different from Intel," said AMD spokesman Bubba
Wolford. "You really would be comparing apples to oranges. We are very
much about an open approach. That includes opening up our chipset, our
platforms and our processors. If you look at 'Torrenza' you see how we
allow companies to innovate around our products," he said.
Source: http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/24/amd_not_another_intel/
Does that means documentation? Or am I just reading too much on the
words "open"?
Doesn't matter what they want it to be interpreted as. What matters is
what they do. No press release will answer that, only time will tell.
By the way, how fares AMD on the "giving documentation" department?
There's a reason OpenBSD/amd64 existed so soon after the chip was
shipping... Something tells me this helped them, too -- I would have
expected the amd64 instructions to remain almost completely unused by
the mainstream OSs, had not the open source world shown what this chip
could do. The computer world is full of cases of processors with
superior instruction sets that were just used as "faster" versions of
older chips by the mainstream OSs, like the Z-80, the 80286, 80386,
680[12346]0... (Remember that period when games were requiring 80386
processors for speed, but EMS RAM for memory? What idiots.)
Something happened with the amd64, something really good for AMD, and
bad for a lot of other people, and something that I don't think I've
seen in the computer world before.
On the other hand...past performance doesn't predict future behavior.
Long ago, as part of a high school project, I had to get an annual
report from a company and read through it. Mine had an interesting
quote, which stuck in my head as very enlightened and I paraphrase it here:
"We do not rely on patent and copyright to maintain our market
position, but rather constant innovation and R&D, which are much more
appropriate and effective protections in the rapid moving world of
technology"
(keep in mind, I can't even recall my GF's telephone number, so don't
expect to find that a very accurate quote, but the spirit is pretty
close, I do believe)
That enlightened company? None other than Intel, probably 1979 to 1982.
Obviously, something changed, probably the rise of the lawyers and
the decline of the engineers at Intel. If someone happens to have old
Intel Annual Reports to Shareholders, it would be an interesting thing
to have a photocopy of...
Things can change, in any direction.
Nick.
