Intel Potentially Reverse-Engineered AMD64 324
icypyr0 writes "Tom Halfhill, an analyst for In-Stat/MDR claims that due to similiarities in the instruction sets of AMD64 chips and the new 64-bit extensions for Intel Xeons, it is clear that Intel reverse-engineered the AMD64. However, due to the fact that the new Xeon is not an exact copy of the AMD64's microarchitecture, Intel has not broken the law. This very tactic has actually been used by firms such as AMD in the past to catch up to Intel."
AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Interesting)
In Slashdot Utopia we could mark this article as "-1, Yellow Journalism".
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Funny)
Has anyone submitted a patch to slash for story moderation? At least then the editors can't claim the code isn't there...
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you did have the transistor level blueprints of the logic implementation, what exactly would you be reverse engineering?
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Interesting)
Year=1999 specs etc released
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,783 2 _8366_7595 ~751,00.html
Year=2000 _simulator_ released
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832 _8366_7595 ~7363,00.html
That's plenty of time. IIRC AMD even invited Intel to join the x86-64 side.
The issue is whether Intel needs a license. Maybe they indeed did a clean room implementation of AMD64. I'm not sure Intel can use that method to successfully avoid getting a lic
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalReso
Whoa..
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are options out there my friend (Power, Sparc, ARM... I happen to adore my power based macs). Its not like anyone is shoving the X86 arch. down our throat. Intel, in fact, has been trying to shove the good ship Itanic down the high end's throat and the high end told him to piss off. Face facts, technology doesn't always trump economics. Get over it (and go buy a Mac if you hate the x86 so much).
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Insightful)
The key is that software writers (other than assembly) don't care about hardware; they care about maximizing the number of customers. Customers want cheap, fast and good software and hardware. If most customers currently have x86, and it would cost more to develop for other platforms (think beta-testing on every type of hardware), then software makers can minimize costs, and expediate release dates by
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Informative)
And neither would Intel. Its called EPIC, which is one step beyond VLIW (ok maybe only a half a step), which is one step beyond RISC, which is one step beyond CISC (x86).
In fact the AMD/Intel cross-licensing may well be the most significant reason x86 has continued to be the dominant design for so long. The mutual co-opetition has served to make both offerings consistently better over time.
What amazes me is that x86 has been so resilient (x86-64/EMT64 being the lat
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Insightful)
So?
The 99.9% of people writing apps in any langauge as abstract as C or higher don't have to worry about the CPU architecture. If it compiles and runs these languages at a price/performance ratio favorable to other CPUs, then nobody sould have a problem with it.
The true runtime architecture of an X86 CPU (and most RISC chips as well) has been mostly unfathomable to humans since the Pentium Pro came out. The X86 instruction set is just a backwards-compatible abstraction that is used to logically specify what needs to be done. The chip transforms these instructions to something completely different at runtime. For example, X86 chips already do have dozens of the "multi-purpose" registers you're pining for; you just don't see them at the visible instruction set level. When you do "assembly programming" on a modern CPU, you're not much closer to the real hardware than you are writing in C.
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Informative)
Since the Pentium Pro, Intel's IA32-based chips (and AMD's chips from a similar point in time I'm sure) have actually had to translate IA32 instructions into an even lower-level RISC-like instruction set before they were executed. At this point the IA32 instruction set no longer truly reflects the runtime architecture of an x86 CPU.
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Funny)
Dammit! I told you not to let the workers have any chains!
Re:Neither can the compiler see these new register (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the way CPU performance works today isn't really intuitive. A modern CPU can slice each opcode into several independent primitive operations and run each of those independently. In fact, it can reorder the suboperations from a variety of opcodes and do the work as it can be done, delaying for later the primitives that depend on long-latency things like data from cache. It can also execute many operations after a branch before it knows that the branch will be taken, and throw away all of those results if the branch gets mispredicted. The CPU may be simultaneosly working on dozens of opcodes at any given point in time.
To support this craziness, the CPU uses "register renaming", which allots dynamic assignments for the user-visible registers from a bank of generic hardware registers. At any one time, you may have several versions of "EAX" simultaneously exist in the CPU; these represent the value of EAX at different logical points in the program code (some of the values may later be found to be useless because of speculative execution).
So what the programmer thinks of as a bottleneck of loading and storing EAX a couple of times in succession may turn out not to be a bottleneck at all if the values are logically independent. The instructions may be reordered so that both loads of EAX exist at the same time, regardless of what one would assume from looking at the linear opcode sequence. In this case you get to simultaneously use more registers than what you can see.
While its hard for assembly programmers to keep this straight, compiler writers can emit code that is aware of the CPUs behavior to take advantage of these features as much as possible. The X86 instruction set is a kind of bytecode abstraction; the compiler and CPU can mutually understand that there are ways to transcend the apparent limitations of that visible architecture.
The bottom line is that register pressure is an issue, but register renaming in the X86 helps to mitigate it. Moreover, AMD's 64-bit extension adds lots of new programmer-visible registers, further reducing the problem. The real challenges going forward with current CPU designs today are improving branch prediction with ever-deepening pipelines, increasing cache size as the CPU speed continues to outstrip DRAM speed, and managing power consumption as gate leakage and transistor count increase. All CPU architectures need to deal with these issues, X86 and RISC included.
(Itanium was meant to be a new approach to the branch-prediction issue, pushing the intelligence to the software compiler; it hasn't been a resounding success. It also really pushed the cache size by including monster caches, and this has been the main reason for its reputation as an expensive power guzzler. The CPU core really isn't that big or complex.)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Interesting)
No multi-purpose registers? x86-64 has 16 general purpose registers and 16 double-precision floating point registers (the latter capable of holding 2
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that these dogs outperform their contemporary RISC competition.
Evidenced by the volume of x86 ASM source, as well as like a million assemblers that are available for it? x86 ASM has its warts but it has some unusual advantages as well (complex addressing, lock primitives, free implicit flag calculations, etc) RISC and VLIW/EPIC have not been convincing alternatives to x8
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Informative)
Security wise, it is bad that Intel decided not to copy the NX (No Excute on pages) part as well.The NX is not an AMD invention, of course, but it's very nice that they included it. And who uses this? OpenBSD developers was not very happy with the Intel decision : they actually recommend buying AMD before Intel.
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but intel needs something to differentiate the Xeon from the itanic i.e. they can claim you need to buy an intanic to get this high-tech, innovative intel security feature. Many corporates still don't buy AMD because there hasn't been big name backing until now. intel hopes that it can still market its way past some peoples' ignorance.
Re:AMD and Intel have a cross-licencing agreement. (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like... (Score:5, Informative)
So reverse engineering is not a problem in this case. In fact, it's not unlikely that AMD simply handed them the documentation.
But reverse engineering isn't "Handing them the document," as you put it. They have the right to produce a chip which uses the same instruction set (x86-64) within their chip, but they have to find a way to build it themselves...unless they reverse engineer the design of the chip itself...happens all the time...Z80 ring a bell? AMD did the exact same thing with the Intel 286, 386, and 486...took Intel's chip and reversed the design...until they finally came out with their own design of the 5x86 architecture, the K5. The K5 still used the x86 instruction set, but executed it with their own engineered design. So, maybe this is a good sign of Intel now being the follower instead of the leader.
Re:Looks like... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Looks like... (Score:5, Informative)
Intel licensed AMD to produce their designs, as a second source, up through the 80286. Intel masks and all. By the time the 386 came out, Intel didn't need AMD any more (they had multiple fabs and a good enough reputation, plus a lock on PC-compatible chips). So they told AMD that the agreement didn't apply any more. I don't remember if AMD won or lost on the 80386. But it certainly didn't last until the 486. So AMD did their own design, without any help from Intel. The court did note that a number could not be trademarked. It was thus never the "80486"; I think "i486" was a trademark, not that anybody cared, and that's why the next Intel chip was "Pentium".
AMD's "586"-class chip, the K5, was a dog. They then bought NexGen and adapted its RISC-innard design to the K6, which rocked, and fit a Pentium socket. Intel put tighter patents on the PII socket so AMD built the Athlon on DEC's Alpha socket electrical design.
Intel didn't have to change the ISA (drop the NX, for instance) in order to be legal. Either they goofed, or they sabotaged their own 64-bit x86 upgrade (as others here have suggested) in order to create a niche for the Itanic.
Re:Looks like... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't remember if AMD won or lost on the 80386. But it certainly didn't last until the 486.
What lasted until the 486 was the legal battle. AMD did end up losing but not until after they had reverse engineered Intel's 486. AMD later did their own version of the 486. The first version of AMD's 486 just changed the microcode, enough to make it a "legal copy" so to speak. Later they designed an entirely new chip called the 5x86 that offered decent performanced compared to Intel's early Pentiums but at
Re:Looks like... (Score:3, Insightful)
AFAICT, the Intel stuff is no more "reverse engineered" from AMD64 than Linux is "reverse engineered" from Unix. It's simply another implementation of the spec.
In related news.... (Score:3, Funny)
Reverse engineering was NEVER a problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Reverse engineering is NEVER a problem. The very concept that it MIGHT be is recent - and driven by propaganda from the software industry.
Historically, industries have reverse engineered nearly everything: Cars, looms, what have you. (Auto compaines, for instance, have entire DEPARTMENTS to disassemble and reverse-engineer their competitors' products.)
You can patent an idea -
Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
this story is null and void (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this story is null and void (Score:3, Interesting)
So, it's not just a benefit to Intel and AMD, but really to everyone, even those who run Linux on x86, since it helps keep the hardware costs down.
So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, it doesn't mean AMD is the "market leader" (normally measured in $$$), nor even the overall technology leader, but being copied by Intel sure bolsters AMD's image.
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
You must not know how to read slashdot ID #'s.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows how slashdot ID #'s work.
In a now famous episode of short sightedness, CmdrTaco said, "Slashdot will never need more than 640K IDs," and determined that slashdot IDs would count down from 640K and stop when they hit 0.
Your ID of 15628 indicates both that you are new here, and that the end is near.
umm yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel and AMD have a broad patent cross licensing agreement, so it's not a big deal.
Something they left out... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Something they left out... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Something they left out... (Score:2, Informative)
But given how MS bragg it as a security measure, I can take bets
Stephane
Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Something they left out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Something they left out... (Score:4, Interesting)
Shouldn't cause any major problems. Only the kernel have to deal with this when setting up page tables. Any correctly written program will work the same on both processors. What will be the difference is, that some buggy code and some security exploits will work only on Intel and not on AMD.
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
Copy-Cat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. Although don't forget cross-licensing deals as well e.g. Pentium.
The fact that Intel went to all this work simply shows that AMD made the better decision with it's architecture.
Re:Copy-Cat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Copy-Cat. (Score:5, Interesting)
We had several years of "DOStel".
Remember when 8086's and 80286's were made by everybody from Harris to NEC? DOS was the standard, and LIM 4 was the memory overlay spec. You could USE something goofy like NEC's 20MHz 8086 clone - when the Intel part topped off shy of 8 Mhz, and the 286 ran at 12MHz!
The whole kit was nearly "off-the-shelf", except for the BIOS. This was what Compaq "clean-room" reverse engineered with such care.
Re:Copy-Cat. (Score:2)
Reverse engineer ... instruction set?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reverse engineer ... instruction set?! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's very rare that the instruction set is the end of the story. There's alot of "gray area" that may or may not be documented and tons of undocumented instructions -- that was always the shtick with Intel. These gray areas need to be compatible as well. Hopefully AMD did things more straightforward.
Although I can't believe they wouldn't provide documentation to Intel, th
Re:Reverse engineer ... instruction set?! (Score:5, Insightful)
-OR-
coke could publish the recipe and I could make some at home combining vanilla, lemon and cinnamon.
The former is reverse engineering, the later is what Intel did.
Re:Reverse engineer ... instruction set?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reverse engineer ... instruction set?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Intel didn't have to do anything like that; they already had the documentation, all the specs, just had to implement it. Humans probably didn't even implement it. Geez. No reverse engineering here.
Re:Reverse engineer ... instruction set?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Reverse engineering [wikipedia.org] is taking a product and making a specification for it.
This is clearly an example of normal engineering.
License if Free (Score:4, Interesting)
I have not read the license but maybe deliberately breaking the compatibility may not be an option, and god forbid having your "innovations" stymied. [/sarcasm]
Cross-licensing (Score:5, Informative)
AMD passes Intel. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the shoe's on the other foot. AMD has taken one of the signs that used to say Intel was the market leader.
AMD will have the last laugh here (Score:5, Funny)
Really?! (Score:2)
Re:Really?! (Score:2, Informative)
Homer sez mmmmmm (Score:2)
"Mmmmmmm. Crisp mp3 animals......mmmmmmmm"
Re:AMD will have the last laugh here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:AMD will have the last laugh here (Score:5, Funny)
"We don't need no "Media Player"
"We don't need no content control"
"No dark embracing, or extension"
"Hey Redmond! Leave script kids alone!"
"All in all, we're all just borg in the cube"
Re:AMD will have the last laugh here (Score:4, Funny)
I think it needs more cowbell.
Re:AMD will have the last laugh here (Score:4, Funny)
Re:AMD will have the last laugh here (Score:3, Informative)
Yep, Intel sure suffered A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Not reverse engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD didn't even have silicon before Intel started building 'yamhill', so by definition of the term, it is impossible for Intel to have reverse engineered.
It's JUST MORE FUN!! (Score:5, Funny)
Intel employee B: Yee Hah!! I've almost figured out how they do this last opcode!
Intel employee A: Yeah, it's on page 183 of this. Read it.
Intel employee B: Leave me alone!! Specifications are for weenies! I'll reverse engineer it. You can keep the specs, thanks.
So...What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the little guys can do it, the big guys can do it, too. No double standards, please.
Re:So...What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Happens all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
Tom's calling his attorney now... (Score:2)
What's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it. PCs are almost struggling for good 64-bit compatibility. Chances are that they got a clue and decided to do what Apple-hardware did with PowerPC many many years ago.
Remember, Motorola & IBM both had PowerPC standards. Why shouldn't Intel & AMD learn how to get along as well?
How is it reverse engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if they tried to duplicate the internals as well, id give you that it would be in that case..
But sounds like Intel did nothing more then clone the functionality of a black box, using their own techniques.
Or perhaps I'm just nitpicking on terminology..
Re:How is it reverse engineering? (Score:2, Informative)
No way Intel is going to do something like this. (Score:4, Informative)
Besides: (1) Intel and AMD have all sorts of cross-licensing things in place, and (2) there are only so many ways to extend a 32-bit arch to 64-bit.
Intel's "IA32e" is fundamentally an Intel design, with 64-bit extensions. I think IA32e is basically a Prescott (or later) core. Intel and AMD go about their CISC-front-end-to-RISC-core in quite different ways with quite different results in terms of efficiency, etc.
So, the bottom line is that I'm sure, given that they do execute the same instruction set, that there will be MANY similarities, but they will be either accidental or necessary similarities.
Instruction sets want to be free! (Score:3, Funny)
Legal? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, if what Halfhill says is true, how did Intel make it illegal for VIA to make a chipset for the P4? How did Intel prevent AMD from making chips that would fit in Socket 370 and Slot 1? That was the reason for the "socket wars" - to prevent AMD from making compatible products.
Thats complete BS if Int
They had to Reverse-Engineer it? (Score:2, Funny)
Not exactly a well informed article (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, there is still some confusion about whether the instructions sets are compatible or not, and people such as Linus has been critisizing [gmane.org] Intel for trying to hide the fact that they are indeed compatible by giving the instruction set another name.
When it comes to licensing of technology, AMD and Intel has had cross-licensing agreements since the seventies, and there has been roumors for a long time [theinquirer.net] that these has included x86-64.
The Real Story (tm) (Score:4, Insightful)
Two missing instructions (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that they won't be able to, as compatibility and optimization lies a mere recompile away. However, if they were going to be 100% binary compatible, the results would be most interesting. Just imagine the carnage from head-to-head competition between Intel and AMD. While they have competed in the past, they have always had slightly different offerings. Their different feature sets were needed by different people. If these were identical, then AMD and Intel would be on the same battleground with the same featureset.
It would be an interesting battle indeed. AMD's low cost and efficiency (and overclockability) versus Intel's brute-force and high-speed (and marketing). I suppose we'll have to wait for the next round for anything along those lines though.
LAHFing out loud (Score:3, Informative)
There were actually tools to
Fire the slashdot editor who dropped the ball. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is truly a sad, sad state of affairs when stupid, unresearched yellow journalism like this makes the front page of Slashdot. We have known for *years* about the cross licensing of patents between AMD and Intel. It's been reported ON THIS SITE.
I normally don't like to flame the editors, but this is nearly unforgivable.
Goodbye Karma.
Goodbye Intel... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Intel's processor, I haven't heard good things. I saw an article on either The Register or The Inquirer that pointed to an article in c't [heise.de] about the Noncona [heise.de] (English [google.com] thanks to Google) that Noncona is in trouble. According to the article in c't, a beta tester described the performance of the chip succintly: "It sucks." The article also states that HP has decided to only use Opteron chips, so perhaps it knows this fact too. The article doesn't say why (although it speculates that it's only emulating parts of the 64 bit instruction set). The article also has some info on some other things.
All in all, after all their foot dragging, I've lost interest in Intel. I'm worried that it won't perform as well as an Opteron. I'm worried it will be a blast furnace (Opteron's aren't cool by any means, but they look only luke-warm compared to Presshot). And I have read speculation (which I believe) that Intel is going to move to an integrated memory controller (like the Opteron) for performance reasons. Let's not forget that Intel is pushing a whole new form factor (BTX) just to help controll heat (or at least that seems to be it's major contribution to the world). AMD used to look like a "me too" company to me, making knockoffs. But over time (starting with the Athlon) I've been watching them and I no longer see them as an "also ran", they seem to be the REAL innovators these days.
AMD vs. Intel:
There are tons more. I saw an article on it the other day. Intel is not on sure footing, if you ask me. Between the problems above, the trend to sub $500 computers, and just AMDs gaining reputation, Intel could be in trouble. It has recently admitted that it can't continue to use the P4 and is going to build it's future chips off of it's mobile chip because they can't keep speeding up the P4, it's not worth it.
Re:Goodbye Intel... (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel has become the underdog either refusing to look and devlop or thinking that 'name' will build and hold them marketshare. GM, Ford and Chrysler thought the same way back in the early 80's and it nearly killed all three. It may well kill Intel off if they don't smarten up.
Re:Goodbye Intel... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Goodbye Intel... (Score:4, Informative)
However, where I disagree with your assessment is about the dropping of the P4 architecture, going with a Pentium M derivative. I think thats the best move Intel can make at this time, and that while it might be a bit confusing to consumers, they're going to develop some very good chips as a result. I've always felt that the P4 was a stupid design to begin with, that only stayed competitive through hacks and ingenuity on the part of Intel's engineers. Now that they're going back to a good architecture, we could very well see another dynasty like the P6 core presided over.
if only (Score:5, Funny)
Quite true indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
needless to say I was a little surprised when I saw this...but not to surprised.
Reverse Engineering in other fields (Score:3, Funny)
Gee, can I do this with music, and then the RIAA can't touch me?
Most likely NOT reverse-engineeered (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps Mr. Halfhill is confused about what the term "reverse-engineering" means. Specifically, it is reconstructing specifications and design information from a finished product. Designing a new, compatible product from published documentation is not in any sense reverse engineering.
It's not clear that Intel would have broken the law even if they HAD made an exact copy of AMD's microarchitecture.Microarchitecture per se is not protected by law, though aspects of it could be patented. But Intel and AMD have patent cross-licenses, to that is not an issue. A specific mask layout may be protected by copyright law, but it's quite possible to copy microarchitecture without copying mask layout.
It is also possible that AMD may have provided the x86-64 architecture documentation to Intel under NDA well before the public release. The very name, "x86-64", was suprisingly vendor-neutral. I suspect that AMD only renamed it to AMD64 after they believed they had been unsuccessful at convincing Intel to produce compatible processors. Intel denied for years that they would offer a 64-bit extension of any kind for the x86, despite the widespread rumors to the contrary.
More detail (Score:3, Informative)
Although there were rumors about an Intel Yamhill 64-bit x86 part for many years, they didn't announce an 64-bit x86 architecture extension until February 18, 2004, and it was announced sheepishly as a very minor point in a press release [intel.com] rather than amid great fanfare as AMD had done. Intel still ha
Some hints from an ex-Intel engineer (Score:4, Informative)
When AMD only started to loudly talk about x86-64, my friend - u-code designer - told me in a private conversation that "...the management is worried, I was asked to look into the possibility of implementing u-code extensions of those new instructions. I'll look at their public specs today. After all, there's not much else to be changed except the u-code".
I guess he did - but we never spoke about that later.
The point is:
1. Intel was preparing an answer to x86-64 as early as AMD started to talk about it.
2. Intel was quite understandingly taking a wait-and-see approach to that - no one would pull the plug on an already available product, no matter how well it's selling, in favour of competitor's hype. They only started taking real marketing steps when it was obvious that x86-64 is getting accepted and didn't want to lose this market completely.
3. The implementation is 100% in-house using only AMDs public specs. The uArch was ready before Athlon64 launch, for just in case, and they started marketing it as early as it was clearly no-other-choice situation. C'mon, give Intel some credit - why steal from AMD if there's plenty of in-house talent available? They even made Merced work (after only 8 years
I wonder if.... (Score:3, Interesting)
What I think is that Intel is now saying, "Oh crap, we missed 2 instructions!" Now do they quickly add them in to maintain the compatibility, or create this wiered instruction set that is always going to be known as "Intel's Mostly Compatible AMD64 Instruction Set". I would like to see them add the 2 instructions in, just to make it easier for software developers.
AMD Cool'n'Quiet niftier (Score:3, Informative)