Published in Graphics

More light shed on Intel's Radeon powered CPU

by on18 May 2017


Update: Chipzilla is licensing AMD's graphics 

Our original story about Intel licensing AMD graphics created quite an impact, with shock, horror and disbelief from the Intel, AMD and Nvidia types.   

First, we need to make something clear to our non-regular readers. Our sources are well placed, industry insiders, and we would not run the story if we didn't trust them. Fudzilla made a career by being first with many announcements.

This time,  we cannot take the credit, as it was our distinguished colleague Kyle Bennett who broke the news and we just followed his lead. Intel declined to comment at press time, but has now - see below -  has denied it, and we are waiting to hear back from AMD.

After digging a bit deeper, it seems that the Intel and AMD deal will include Intel CPUs using Radeon graphics. You can think of this as a fusion of CPU and GPU cores, or an Intel integrated CPU with better AMD powered graphics. The first products should resurface before the end of the year. It is natural that Intel will deny it all for the moment. In fact it will probably deny it until the day it launches such a product. This is its standard procedure.

The licensing deal was made a while ago, as it takes quite some time to marry the two architectures, The timing of the deal is not perfect as AMD is expected to have its own Zen powered CPU with an integrated graphics before the end of the year. At the time of the deal, AMD didn’t really have a competing CPU architecture and it was not expected that Zen will be a success.  

AMD needs all the money that it can get so potential licensing money is well received and if it's Intel outside, so much the better. Nvidia got back to us with the following:

We (Nvidia) describe the license agreement in our Form 8-K, dated January 10, 2011, available here, which says:

“Under the patent cross license agreement, Intel has granted to NVIDIA and its qualified subsidiaries, and NVIDIA has granted to Intel and Intel’s qualified subsidiaries, a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide license, without the right to sublicense to all patents that are either owned or controlled by the parties at any time that have a first filing date on or before March 31, 2017, to make, have made (subject to certain limitations), use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwise dispose of certain semiconductor- and electronic-related products anywhere in the world.”

It is clear that March 31, 2017 is quite more than yesterday, so this deal has finished without being officially prolonged. It is unclear what happened after March 31, 2017 as neither Nvidia nor Intel is saying.

An Intel spokesperson got back to us with: "The recent rumors that Intel has licensed AMD's graphics technology are untrue."

Well, it would say that, wouldn't it?

 





Last modified on 18 May 2017
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