Dresdenboys' blog: AMD Bulldozer - Patent based research

[Hans de Vries]

But in case of AMD I think we can take patents in a different way. Intel, IBM and other large companies have a lot of people working on such designs and try to cover many ideas to fill their IP pool. AMD is not so much IP oriented (just protecting itself somehow) because it can't afford to pay for tons of potentially useless patents and waste a lot of the design teams' time for developing "fun architectures" and patenting them. However, if someone developed an idea with some future potential, they might patent it just in case. That likely happens often during the early design stages.

Actually, when one really studies the field, AMD has a very impressive patent portfolio ... it's not quantity, it's quality. I guess that is pretty much what you said.

Jack

Generally AMD patents highlight aspects from a certain micro-architecture
which is the same in a whole set of patents and described in each of them.

These micro-architectures have evolved over the last 10-15 years.
Cluster based superscalar processing has evolved to Cluster based multi-
threading as a more effective way of doing SMT which suffers from a
high pressure on the Load/Store units and the L1 caches as Fred Weber
already mentioned years ago as AMD CTO.

The origins of Cluster based superscalar processing as a successor of
superscalar processing go back even further in time as this DEC patent
filed in 1995 shows: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6167503.pdf


Regards, Hans