Intel and AMD have what can only be described as a complex history of fierce competition, cooperation, and ebbs and flows. You might think from the headline that AMD just bought Intel, but that is not the case. Instead, the two companies are coming together to support x86 customers. At OCP Summit 2024 today, the companies announced a new x86 advisory board. The goals are to enable consistency and accelerate the time to market of the x86 ecosystem. A subtext here is that AMD and Intel are working to unify the x86 ISA between the two companies instead of competitively developing their own x86 ISA flavors.
Hell Freezes Over as AMD and Intel Come Together
Here is the quote from the joint Intel and AMD press release on the announcement:
The advisory group aims to unite industry leaders to shape the future of x86 and foster
developer innovation through a more unified set of instructions and architectural
interfaces. This initiative will enhance compatibility, predictability and consistency across
x86 product offerings. To achieve this, the group will solicit technical input from the x86
hardware and software communities on essential functions and features. Collaboration
will facilitate the creation of consistent and compatible implementations of key x86
architectural features and programming models, extending across all sectors – including
data centers, cloud, client, edge and embedded devices – ultimately delivering
downstream benefits to customers. The intended outcomes include:
- Enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while
accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features. - Simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and
standardize interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD. - Enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating
systems, frameworks and applications.
As vigorous competitors, Intel and AMD at the same time share a history of industry
collaboration focused on platform-level advancements, the introduction of standards, and
security vulnerability mitigation within the x86 ecosystem. Their joint efforts have shaped
key technologies, including PCI, PCIe, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI).
Both companies also played a pivotal role in developing USB, a vital connectivity standard
for all computers regardless of the processor. This advisory group takes this industry
collaboration to the next level for the benefit of the entire computing ecosystem and as a
catalyst for product innovation. (Source: Intel and AMD press release.)
Final Words
This is probably the biggest shift in x86 in decades. Intel and AMD have developed together for years, but as Forrest Norrod called it before the announcement, “at arm’s length.” The companies plan to remain fierce competitors, but the idea is that customers will benefit from standards being worked on jointly between the companies.
The initial advisory list includes Broadcom, Dell, Google, HP, Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Linus Torvalds, and Tim Sweeny.
Taking a step back, this makes quite a bit of sense. When we talk about CPUs, there is already competition from Arm and the somewhat wild west of RISC-V. Even with a consistent ISA for x86, CPUs are not a single core anymore. Instead, CPUs have massive I/O complexes and can have large differences in how caches, memory, branch prediction, and so forth, giving a lot of room for innovation. I do not think this means that both companies have the same CPUs. This is more of just maintaining a common ISA.
Still, this is a big deal. Instead of AMD and Intel designing similar-ish x86 ISAs, the companies are going to unify that part of the design going forward. That will simplify tasks like VM migrations, code ports and optimizations, and so forth. This huge deal shows the competition AMD and Intel face from hyper-scalers building Arm chips and a cool OCP announcement.
Hmmm “At arm’s length” vs “At ARM’s length” definitely compiles to different semantics.
Can’t Intel implement any CPU instruction developed by AMD free of charge and vice versa due to the 2009 cross-patent agreement?
You’d think that would already provide considerable incentive to not try and develop different implementations of the same feature, as it would be cheaper to just copy the hard work done by your competitor if they were earlier than you in developing feature X.
Which can only mean x86 platform is slowly sinking.
ARM and others are coming.
So mortal enemies on x86 – Chipzilla and its only prisoner that managed to survive and against all odds thrive had to put aside their personal scores to save the x86 platform itself.
Yes, they’ve managed to repel initial ARM onslaught, but writing is on the wall.
Computing itself (let alone CPU ISA) will have to radically change soon.
So now AMD and Intel have to mend the holes and somehow structure, control and pace tha change to give x86 every competitive edge they can.
It’s funny to see Intel fart about “ecosystem” after they did their best to destroy every competitor on it.
Like VIA or Transmeta and many others.
Eh, Karma is a b*tch.
Just in time for X86S hitting the market and making that same.
Hopefully this kills the stupid variants of AVX10 too.
Intel never would have done this if they weren’t circling the drain financially.
I am getting a big laugh out of this joint effort after the 1990s early 2000s for the hell between them. It still hurts in the OEM space other than the Enterprise arena for AMD. Still, the rise of ARM’s easier performance characteristics and when RISC was still the mighty Enterprise architecture from the ancients. It all falls down on the OS, HV, Apps to dictate what can do better. Still Perf/W might be the standard of choice?!
Seems this is a response to Apple’s M processors actually being competitive. Apple had to drop a ton of legacy support to pull it off though (which they then later supported rather well through an emulation layer). Intel/AMD don’t have that luxury … yet. I imagine Intel/AMDs collab here will most likely be the opposite of technical progress, but in an underlying agreement on which legacy parts of the ISA to BOTH stop shipping. Just looking at the other members of the advisory list seems to support this, because OS vendors (Microsoft/Red Hat/Google) will need to pull out those code paths or re-architect under the assumption that they’re gone.
Apple has the advantage (vertical integration) of designing its OS and Processor to work intimately together and only worry about that. Intel/AMD/Microsoft/Google/etc do not.
For reference, not an Apple apologist here. I actually think they’re quite awful.
@ Frank: yes, my understanding re. cross licensing is the same as yours. Moreover microsoft has been the de-facto standard enforcer of x86. For example, it was they who compelled intel to adopt amd64. They will generally discourage fragmentation as it makes life harder for windows. As a big buyer of server chips, google has similar leverage. This consortium is simply broadening the tent and making it official. Of course AMD’s increasing market share has precipitated this: x86 standardization was a non-issue in 2015, when AMD was single digit market share. Intel had no incentive to support AMDs ISA extensions, and AMD had no choice but to implement intel’s spec, years after they made it public (see AVX2,AVX512 etc). Today, google and ms would prefer their server fleet to have less isa fragmentation. Hence this. I don’t think ARM has anything to do with this. AMD’s market share gains in server is sufficient enough
I dunno about Hell freezing over. They license eachothers tech a lot. Example: Intel EMT64 was actually AMD x86/64 with a blue Intel sticker on the front. Example: AMD implemented AVX2 & 512 but Intel developed them.
@emerth While the competition did implement those extension, they did so after they were announced with their competitor having a clear time-to-market advantage. AMD’s implementation of AVX-512 comes five years after Intel ship their first units capable of executing those instructions. The Pentium 4 didn’t gain 64 bit support two years after AMD started shipping their Athlon 64’s. Intel was developing their own 64 bit extensions for x86 but it was Microsoft that put their foot down in that they’d only develop for a single 64 bit extension and they had already committed to AMD’s.
What this collaboration does is hopefully more simultaneous release of new x86 extensions and that they’ll be coherent in their implementation between vendors. This is just as much about appeasing developers as it is being competitive with other architectures. There is a lot of new extensions coming that make this rather important. APX doubles the number of GPR to 32 which brings x86 in-line with many RISC architectures. x86S attempts a full 64 bit implementation. Intel has various AVX10 proposals which I’m personally hoping this collaboration kills several poor choices in it. While not actively being considered, it would be nice to have some consistency for accelerators and heterogeneous compute facilities.
@Kevin G, the timelines were as you say. It was competition. If it is to be x86 vs ARM vs bespoke hyperscaler designs, then AMD should just bite the bullet and stage a hostile takeover of Intel.
I don’t see cooperation working beyween the two. Intel’s culture of long sharp knives militates against it.
My $0.02.