Comment by fishgoesblub
12 hours ago
I don't expect a good reason given the history of this Administration, but a reason in my mind to save Intel is there's only 3 license holders for x86 CPUs. Intel, AMD (American), and VIA (Taiwanese). A dead Intel leaves a single American company that is able to make x86 processors, and a monopoly for actually good x86 CPUs. But somehow I suspect there's no logical reason for this besides lining the pockets of those in the Administration.
What is missing is that Intel has US based foundries and US based talent.
Why would the ISA matter to the government? I could see this being about Intel's physical manufacturing capabilities, but the ISA should be pretty irrelevant. Recompile what code you can, run the rest via qemu-user-static.
I hope this is not the reason. I think x86 is a deadend technology. ARM's energy superiority makes it a better choice. x86 only still being used due to legacy/backwards compatibility but thats changing. Apple moved completely away from x86. Theres more and more ARM based windows computers being sold. Theres no x86 chips in phones.
A dead Intel could open the door to have more then three license holders. Isn't Intel the reason there are only three license holders?
The major patents on all the most important parts of x86 expired years ago now. Nobody wants to take on a legacy ISA with tons of footguns everywhere when newer ISAs have learned a lot of lessons from x86 about how to do things better.
What about Hygon?
I haven't heard of them until this comment, but reading through Wikipedia, and a techpowerup article, I'm not seeing that they actually own a license to manufacture x86 cpus freely. It seems like they were able to due to it being a partnership with AMD. I could easily be wrong though.
From my vague understanding I thought that Hygon is able to build atop Zen 1 IP that AMD gave Hygon, although they can't get anything newer because of restrictions on doing business with China.
Hygon still seems to be making x86 CPUs: https://www.techpowerup.com/336529/hygon-prepares-128-core-5....
While there are other good reasons to save Intel, if it went under, someone could still buy the license. I can’t imagine why anyone would want a license to x86 in 2025. It’s not like all of the companies designing custom chips are going to be falling over themselves to design use the x86 ISA.