No, AMD Is Not Buying Intel (gadgetreview.com) 23
"The April 1st timing should have been your first clue," writes Gadget Review. TechSpot's false story was just an April Fool's prank — although Gadget Review thinks it's still funny how "something about this particular piece of satire felt uncomfortably plausible."
Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41, or perhaps it's the poetic justice of the underdog finally eating the giant. The semiconductor world has witnessed stranger reversals, but none quite this dramatic. Your gaming rig's CPU battle represents decades of corporate warfare, legal grudges, and technological leapfrogging that makes Game of Thrones look like a friendly board game.
Picture this: In 1975, AMD reverse-engineered Intel's 8080 processor, creating the Am9080 clone. The audacity was breathtaking — AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That's a 1,400% markup on borrowed technology, making today's GPU prices look reasonable. This relationship evolved from copying to partnership to bitter rivalry. The companies signed second-sourcing deals in the late 1970s, with AMD becoming Intel's official backup supplier. Then came the lawsuits. AMD sued Intel for antitrust violations in 2005, eventually settling for $1.25 billion in 2009. That settlement money helped fund the Ryzen revolution that's currently eating Intel's lunch. The historical irony runs deeper than your typical tech rivalry. AMD literally started as Intel's shadow, creating chips by studying Intel's designs under microscopes. Today, Intel engineers probably study AMD's Zen architecture the same way...
This April Fool's joke works because it captures something true about power shifts in technology.
The site TipRanks notes that both companies saw their stock price rise Wednesday, though that might not be related to the false article. "Positive analyst coverage from Wells Fargo could be acting as a catalyst for AMD stock today. Intel also announced plans to buy back its 49% equity interest in a joint venture with Apollo Global Management APO."
Picture this: In 1975, AMD reverse-engineered Intel's 8080 processor, creating the Am9080 clone. The audacity was breathtaking — AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That's a 1,400% markup on borrowed technology, making today's GPU prices look reasonable. This relationship evolved from copying to partnership to bitter rivalry. The companies signed second-sourcing deals in the late 1970s, with AMD becoming Intel's official backup supplier. Then came the lawsuits. AMD sued Intel for antitrust violations in 2005, eventually settling for $1.25 billion in 2009. That settlement money helped fund the Ryzen revolution that's currently eating Intel's lunch. The historical irony runs deeper than your typical tech rivalry. AMD literally started as Intel's shadow, creating chips by studying Intel's designs under microscopes. Today, Intel engineers probably study AMD's Zen architecture the same way...
This April Fool's joke works because it captures something true about power shifts in technology.
The site TipRanks notes that both companies saw their stock price rise Wednesday, though that might not be related to the false article. "Positive analyst coverage from Wells Fargo could be acting as a catalyst for AMD stock today. Intel also announced plans to buy back its 49% equity interest in a joint venture with Apollo Global Management APO."
Markup (Score:3, Funny)
AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That's a 1,400% markup
Was an Intel CPU used to compute this?
Re: (Score:3)
Was an Intel CPU used to compute this?
The article says this: "Various sources indicate that a single Am9080 processor cost AMD only 50 cents to make (100 per wafer), yet it could sell them to military customers for $700 each." It however does not name "various sources". My best guess is the $0.50 does not include any capital costs and only certain operational costs.
Re: Markup (Score:3)
I think you missed the point, it's the markup maths that's wrong, not a query about the source figures.
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Re: Markup (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)re pointing out itâ(TM)s not a 1400% markup, itâ(TM)s 1400x, or 140,000%
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Might cost 50 cents to make the chip, but then you have to cover for all the development costs and packaging into a useful package that fits into a socket.
Add some profit on that in order to make the shareholders happy and to cover costs for the next generation and the $700 price tag might be a bit on the high side, but not horrible.
Add to it that not all the chips made are fully functional so there are some losses there too.
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A pizza costs even less that $0.50...
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Re:Intel's political marketing has always been bad (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read this post it shows that AMD stole Intel's design and reverse engineered it.
If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.
There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.
(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)
Re:Intel's political marketing has always been bad (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a mixture. Intel licensed their designs to AMD for a while so IBM could use AMD as a second source. Later they became competitors. There's no evidence of "reverse engineering", which isn't even a bad thing (reverse engineering is what you do if you want to create a 1:1 compatible version of a product without copying it - you basically create as best you can documentation of how something should work, and then use the documentation to create a design) or of stealing it. And why would they steal it and then reverse engineer it? Rather at some point when they stopped getting licenses AMD just... made their own version based on Intel's public specs. As have a number of companies, using various degrees of reverse engineering, including NEC, Chips and Technologies, Cyrix, VMT, VIA Technologies, and even IBM.
Furthermore, the chip in your PC right now, be it Intel's or AMD's, is mostly an AMD design, with some legacy Intel design crufted on. That's right, AMD, not Intel, came up with the 64-bit ABI that most of us have been using since the mid-2010s. And Intel licensed it from them. It's AMD's technology now.
Does that mean Intel are the good guys after all? No, this is corporate bullshit. Neither AMD nor Intel are inherently good or bad. Intel foisted some pretty awful CPU architectures on the world before coming up with a non-mediocre one in the form of the 80386 (cue the idiot I argued with the other day who'll claim the 8086 is a modern CPU and works the way modern CPUs do and does not have a ridiculous architecture - you're still wrong!) because they didn't know what they were doing after FF left to found Zilog, but had the market dominance, mostly through mindshare, to get their CPUs everywhere.
AMD were responsible for the bulk of the "runs a little hot" CPU wars in the late 1990s/early 2000s, where AMD pushed power sucking cooling-system-overworking CPUs to try to beat Intel's performance... but then Intel decided to ape them until the Core architecture, so Intel's not a good guy there either.
Both have made mistakes and tried to paper over them. Both have fired people who didn't deserve it. Both are, ultimately, sociopathic corporations.
Unlike Motorola. Which they still made CPUs. ;-) 68000 FTW!
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Antitrust (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd imagine that the last thing that AMD wants to do would be to attract the attention of the FTC. I'm not sure that they could claim that Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia are their other alternatives
Besides, a part of the reason that AMD became successful was becoming a fabless company, and spinning off their semiconductor manufacturing to Global Foundries. It would defeat the purpose for them to acquire Intel's fabs now, which probably have far greater overhead than Global Foundries did
The last time a major acquisition was attempted - Nvidia buying Arm Holdings from SoftBank, the FTC intervened and prevented it. That was the FTC preventing a US company from acquiring an asset of a foreign - Japanese/British company (depending on how one looks at Arm Holdings). The chances of the FTC allowing a US company from acquiring another US company is even more remote
I think the best thing that Intel can do for itself would be to become a pure player fab - like a TSMC, and sell off its CPU business to Nvidia, and GPU to someone else - Apple maybe? Then as a fab, they can be an alternate source to TSMC, Samsung, Hynix and others
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The last time, it was likely Intel buying up AMD CPUs and dumping them. As well as forcing Microsoft and Sony to use AMD chips.
AMD has its ups and downs, and Intel was riding high, but Intel needed AMD to survive to avoid antitrust activity as well. Getting rid of fabs was one thing as they are expensive.
But Chipzilla is still very big and making a lot of money. And they released new chips that are surprisingly competitive. They're not fast against the top end 9860X3D CPUs, but are very cost competitive whe
It is not the price per share that matters (Score:4, Insightful)
but the market capitalisation ie the total value of all publicly traded shares, but even then AMD beats Intel at £268.77 B [companiesmarketcap.com] vs £191.72 B [companiesmarketcap.com] but by not so great a margin.
Beware it shows me the market cap in British pounds, but that is where I live.
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I'm so glad someone else noticed this. The comment about the comparative stock prices was so extraordinarily stupid I could hardly believe it.
Share price is not market cap (Score:1)
"Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41"
*sigh*
Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
> Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41,
What? This is what passes for financial literacy these days? Do they think that the stock price of two equal companies is equal?
Maybe Berkshire Hathaway Inc, stock price $716,299.99 at the time of writing, can buy both of them, and use the money in the couch to buy Apple? I mean, if that's how the stock market works...
For those who really do think this is a thing, look up "Market Capitalization". That, divided by the number of shares, constitutes the share price, and is the market cap is considered the stock market valuation of a company. AMD does have a higher market cap at $355B to Intel's $253B, but those numbers are within 30% of each other, not nearly 5x.
That would be extremely stupid (Score:2)
Both Intel and AMD need each other. They both sell the CPUs for virtually the only open computing architecture there is the "IBM-PC"-derived "PC". That architecture is what's running all serious workloads as it is currently the only standardized architecture. For ARM you need to port every operating system to every SoC individually. on "PC" you just pop in your USB-stick and can run the same OS image, regardless who made it. There are only minor incompatibilities which can be resolved by checking the PCI bu