zlacker

Intel & AMD have a cross-license agreement covering everything x86 (and x86_64) thanks to lots and lots of lawsuits over their many years of competition.

So while Intel had to bow to AMD's success and give up Itanium, they weren't then limited by that and could proceed to iterate on top of it.

Meanwhile it'll be a cold day in hell before Nvidia licenses anything about CUDA to AMD, much less allows AMD to iterate on top of it.

>>kllrno+(OP)
The original cross licensing was government imposed because a second source was needed for the military.

>>kevin_+Pp
Makes you wonder why DoE labs and similar facilities don't mandate open licensing of CUDA.

>>kllrno+(OP)
Isn't API out of scope for copyright? In the case of CUDA, it seems they can copy most of it and then iterate in their own, keeping a compatible subset.