[HN Gopher] AMD entered the CPU market with reverse-engineered I...
___________________________________________________________________
AMD entered the CPU market with reverse-engineered Intel 8080 clone
50 years ago
Author : ksec
Score : 145 points
Date : 2025-12-24 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| ksec wrote:
| If Intel decide to focus on Foundry, I just wish AMD and Intel
| could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA open
| source or at least available for licensing. I dont want it to end
| up like MIPS or POWER ISA where everything is too little too
| late.
| holowoodman wrote:
| A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and
| therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So
| this won't really help anyone.
|
| And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something
| incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a
| new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
| fooker wrote:
| Software or microcode emulation works pretty well.
|
| So it would be faster and more efficient when sticking to the
| new subset and Nx slower then using the emulation path.
| kimixa wrote:
| You could argue that microcode emulation is what they do
| now.
| ksec wrote:
| There are software compiled today without using MMX support.
| I was thinking the idea of something that is open or for
| licensing is an 86 ISA that is forward compatible. And for
| customers that requires strict backward compatibility they
| could still source it from AMD and Intel.
|
| i.e Software compiled for 86 should work on x86. The value
| for backward compatibility is kept with both Intel and AMD.
| If the market wants something in between they now have an
| option.
|
| I know this isn't a sexy idea because HN or most tech people
| like something shiny and new. But I have always like the idea
| of extracting value from the "old and tried" solutions.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sadly over the past year, Spotify builds require AVX
| extensions. Had an issue updating my 2008 Dell semi-
| upgraded bench PC that has a Q9300 in it (no AVX on it)
|
| But thankfully I could install an old bin and lock it out
| from updating.
|
| Intel's software development emulator might run the newest
| bin but variable how slow it might be.
|
| In other circumstances, the AVX extensions aren't required
| but the app is compiled to fail if they're not required: ht
| tps://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pix02j/hotfix_for.
| ..
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| They recently killed off their recent attempt; x86s.
| tester756 wrote:
| Wut?
|
| >AMD and Intel Celebrate First Anniversary of x86 Ecosystem
| Advisory Group Driving the Future of x86 Computing
|
| Oct 13, 2025
|
| Standardizing x86 features
|
| Key technical milestones, include: FRED
| (Flexible Return and Event Delivery): Finalized as a standard
| feature, FRED introduces a modernized interrupt model
| designed to reduce latency and improve system software
| reliability. AVX10: Established as the next-
| generation vector and general-purpose instruction set
| extension, AVX10 boosts throughput while ensuring portability
| across client, workstation, and server CPUs.
| ChkTag: x86 Memory Tagging: To combat longstanding memory
| safety vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and use-
| after-free errors, the EAG introduced ChkTag, a unified
| memory tagging specification. ChkTag adds hardware
| instructions to detect violations, helping secure
| applications1, operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware.
| With compiler and tooling support, developers gain fine-
| grained control without compromising performance. Notably,
| ChkTag-enabled software remains compatible with processors
| lacking hardware support, simplifying deployment and
| complementing existing security features like shadow stack
| and confidential computing. The full ChkTag specification is
| expected later this year - and for further feature details,
| please visit the ChkTag Blog. ACE (Advanced
| Matrix Extensions for Matrix Multiplication): Accepted and
| implemented across the stack, ACE standardizes matrix
| multiplication capabilities, enabling seamless developer
| experiences across devices ranging from laptops to data
| center servers.
| wtallis wrote:
| Copying and pasting a press release does not make for a
| good comment. Especially because you don't seem to have
| understood what you pasted in, or the context of this
| discussion. What you're demonstrating is several more new
| features added to the pile. Intel's retracted X86S proposal
| was actually about _removing_ legacy features, creating a
| cleaner _subset_ for the modern era.
| tester756 wrote:
| Both x86S and advisory group is about the same: improving
| x86.
|
| As of today it resulted in more features, but who knows
| what changes it will bring tomorrow?
|
| Calling x86 clean up initiative dead/cancelled is quite
| not fair since this group is still working.
| ksec wrote:
| Hi Wtallis, any insight as to why they abandoned the
| idea? I was looking forward to x86s and may be even
| reshaping some of the x86-64 instructions. But looks like
| that is largely gone as well.
| userbinator wrote:
| The "s" stands for "stupid".
|
| But it's fortunate that they realised the main attraction to
| x86 is backwards-compatibility, so attempting to do away with
| that will lead to even less marketshare.
| fulafel wrote:
| 90s x86 from ISA pov is already free to use, no? The original
| patents must have expired and there's no copyright protection
| of ISAs. The thing keeping the symbiotic cross-licensed duopoly
| going is mutating the ISA all the time so they can mix in more
| recently patented stuff.
| tracker1 wrote:
| AFAIK, most of event x86_64 patents are largely expired, or
| will be within the next 6 years. That said, efforts for a
| more open platform are probably more likely to be centered
| around risc or another arm alternative than x86... While I
| could see a standardization of x86 compatible shortcuts for
| use with emulation platforms on arm/risc processors.
| Transmeta was an idea too far ahead of its time.
| fulafel wrote:
| Remembering the Mac ARM transition pain wrt Docker and
| Node/Python/Lambda cross builds targeting servers, there's
| a lot to be said for binary compatibility.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 90% of those problems effect people like you and I,
| developers and power users, not "regular" users of
| machines who are mostly mobile device and occasional
| laptop/desktop _application_ users.
|
| I suspect we'll see somebody -- a phone manufacturer or
| similar device -- make a major transition to RISC-V from
| ARM etc in the next 10 years that we won't even notice.
| fulafel wrote:
| I agree, some will, but it may not be a more open
| platform from developer POV.
| tracker1 wrote:
| You're doing builds for Docker on your desktop for direct
| deployment instead of through a CI/CD service?
|
| My biggest issue was the number of broken apps in Docker
| on Arm based Macs, and even then was mostly able to work
| around it without much trouble.
| fulafel wrote:
| You want to be able to replicate the build in your local
| dev env. And you're not always working on a mature
| project, you first get it working locally. CICD tends to
| be slow and hard to debug.
| fweimer wrote:
| Sure, but why does the developer environment have to be
| the same architecture as in production? Think of it as
| ahead-of-time binary translation if you want to.
|
| These days, even fairly low-level system software is
| surprisingly portable. Entire GNU/Linux distributions are
| developed this way, for the majority of architectures
| they support.
| fweimer wrote:
| I don't think it works that way in practice.
|
| Some distributions like Debian or Fedora will make newer
| features (such as AVX/VEX) mandatory only after the patents
| expire, if ever. So a new entrant could implement the
| original x86-64 ISA (maybe with some obvious extensions like
| 128-bit atomics) in that time frame and preempt the patent-
| based lockout due to ISA evolution. If there was a viable
| AMD/Intel alternative that only implements the baseline ISA,
| those distributions would never switch away from it.
|
| It's just not easy to build high-performance CPUs, regardless
| of ISA.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Far too late for that. Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't
| going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the
| company itself the past few years, it could very well self
| destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the
| next decade, who knows.
| izacus wrote:
| 20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the
| lifetime of home computing as we know it.
|
| So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a
| timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had
| somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT
| on desk.
| fulafel wrote:
| Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept
| going even after they lost their strong positions on the
| market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and
| they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base.
|
| Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more
| than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try
| by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny
| advantage) has closed.
| IshKebab wrote:
| To be clear if x86 is ever as unpopular as SPARC or PowerPC
| I would consider that to be obliterated.
|
| I was thinking more like if it falls to 10% of
| desktop/laptop/server market share, which is still waaaaaay
| more then the nearly-dead architectures you listed.
| Keyframe wrote:
| In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why
| would it?
|
| Mature gallery of software to be ported from TSO to weak
| memory model is a soft moat. So is avx/simd mature dominance
| vs neon/sve. x86/64 is a duopoly and a stable target vs
| fragmented landscape of ARM. ARM's whole spiel is performance
| per watt, scale out type of thing vs scale up. In that sense
| the market has kind of already moved. With ARM if you start
| pushing for sustained high throughput, high performance,
| 5Ghz+ envelope, all the advantages are gone in favor of x86
| so far.
|
| What might be interesting is if let's say AMD adds an ARM
| frontend decoder to Zen. In one of Jim Keller's interviews
| that was shared here, he said it wouldn't be that big of a
| deal to make such a CPU for it to be an ARM decoding one.
| That'd be interesting to see.
| philistine wrote:
| > In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why
| would it?
|
| Laptops. Apple already owned the high margin laptop market
| before they switched to ARM. With phones, tablets, laptops
| above 1k, and all the other doodads all running ARM, it's
| not that x86 will simply disappear. Of course not. But the
| investments simply aren't comparable anymore with ARM being
| an order of magnitude more common. x86 is very slowly
| losing steam, with their chips generally behind in terms of
| performance per watt. And it's not because of any specific
| problem or mistake. It's just that it no longer makes
| economic sense.
| zzzoom wrote:
| Why would the market jump from one proprietary ISA to another
| proprietary ISA?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ask Apple.
| zzzoom wrote:
| Apple's A4 was launched 4 years before RISC-V.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate
| x86 in the next 10-20 years?
|
| Lunar Lake shows that x86 is capable of getting that energy
| efficiency
|
| Panther Lake that will be released in around 30 days is
| expected to show significant improvement over Lunar Lake
|
| So... why switch to ARM if you will get similar perf/energy
| eff?
| fweimer wrote:
| It seems to me that interest in AArch64 for on-promise
| general-purpose compute workloads has largely waned. Are
| Dell/HPE/Lenovo currently selling AArch64 servers? Maybe
| there is a rack-mounted Nvidia DGX variant, but that's more
| focused on GPU compute for sure.
| tester756 wrote:
| >I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a
| subset clean up of x86 ISA
|
| AMD and Intel Celebrate First Anniversary of x86 Ecosystem
| Advisory Group Driving the Future of x86 Computing
|
| Standardizing x86 features
|
| Key technical milestones, include: FRED
| (Flexible Return and Event Delivery): Finalized as a standard
| feature, FRED introduces a modernized interrupt model designed
| to reduce latency and improve system software reliability.
| AVX10: Established as the next-generation vector and general-
| purpose instruction set extension, AVX10 boosts throughput
| while ensuring portability across client, workstation, and
| server CPUs. ChkTag: x86 Memory Tagging: To combat
| longstanding memory safety vulnerabilities such as buffer
| overflows and use-after-free errors, the EAG introduced ChkTag,
| a unified memory tagging specification. ChkTag adds hardware
| instructions to detect violations, helping secure
| applications1, operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware.
| With compiler and tooling support, developers gain fine-grained
| control without compromising performance. Notably, ChkTag-
| enabled software remains compatible with processors lacking
| hardware support, simplifying deployment and complementing
| existing security features like shadow stack and confidential
| computing. The full ChkTag specification is expected later this
| year - and for further feature details, please visit the ChkTag
| Blog. ACE (Advanced Matrix Extensions for Matrix
| Multiplication): Accepted and implemented across the stack, ACE
| standardizes matrix multiplication capabilities, enabling
| seamless developer experiences across devices ranging from
| laptops to data center servers.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm still a heavy advocate for requiring second/dual-sourcing in
| govt contracts... literally for anything that can be considered
| essential infrastructure or communications technology and
| medicine. A role of govt in a capitalist society is to ensure
| competition and domestic availability/production as much as
| possible.
|
| While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should
| largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of
| today's issues stem from too much centralization of
| commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition.
| This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable
| regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most
| people.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption
| of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually
| miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have
| stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus
| here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it
| would affect anything important. You could do everything we do
| today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in
| software, programming languages, and libraries.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm talking about way more than just CPUs... And for your
| question, we'd pretty much miss out on modern-like mobile
| phones entirely. 90nm -> 18A/1.8nm is a LOT of reduction in
| size and energy... not to count the evolution in battery and
| display technology over the same period.
|
| Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an
| enemy that _DOES_ have modern production that you (no longer)
| have... it 's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death.
|
| China, though largely hamstrung, is already well ahead of
| your hypothetical 2005 tech breakpoint.
|
| Beyond all this, it's not even a matter of just slower, it's
| a matter of even practical... You couldn't viably create a
| lot of websites that actually exist on 2005 era technology.
| The performance memory overhead just weren't there yet. Not
| that a lot of things weren't possible... I remember Windows
| 2000 pretty fondly, and you could do a _LOT_ if you had 4-8x
| what most people were buying in RAM.
| fooker wrote:
| China can make CPUs around as good as 2016-18 intel now.
| 15155 wrote:
| > Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an
| enemy that DOES have modern production that you (no longer)
| have... it's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death.
|
| How do you maintain this production with a sudden influx of
| ballistic missiles at the production facility - or a
| complete naval blockade of all food calories to your
| country?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| One superpower being in 2005 for CPUs and another being in
| 2030, and at cold/hot war, would be decisive.
|
| If society as a whole reverted to 2005, we would be fine.
| fweimer wrote:
| I think there have been many improvements since 2005 that are
| not dependent at all on the process node.
| icedchai wrote:
| Software is much, much more bloated today than it was in
| 2005. 64-bit CPUs were available, but not quite mainstream
| yet. A "high end" consumer system had a couple gigabytes of
| RAM and chipset limitations generally capped you out at 4 or
| 8 gigs. You were lucky to have two CPU cores.
|
| If you took today's software and tried running it on a memory
| constrained, slow, 2005 era system, you'd be in for some
| pain.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| I used to daily-drive a Thinkpad X200 from 2008. As soon as
| you touch the modern (i.e. bloated) web, you feel the
| slowness. Other than that and gaming, it ran fine.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I have an unpopular pet theory: the exponentially growing
| software bloat actually exists to _slow_ computers back down
| to bearable levels for common folks, and that 's why the most
| bloated frameworks have consistently replaced obsolete, less
| bloated ones, throughout the last decade.
|
| Why else are everything now seem to be wrappers for wrappers?
| What if the bloat was, subconsciously or whatever, the point?
| izacus wrote:
| I wonder if in 2025 a company would even allowed to start before
| being curb stomped by Intel's IP lawyers. After all, they started
| making clones, something that China gets accused of a lot.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| If the company was based in the EU, local regulation might
| _encourage_ reverse-engineering.
|
| See tangentially related topic from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362927
| userbinator wrote:
| EU or RU.
| jezek2 wrote:
| You can do it with HW accelerated emulation like Apple did with
| M1 CPUs. They implemented x86 compatible behavior in HW so the
| emulation has very good performance.
|
| Another approach was Transmeta where the target ISA was
| microcoded, therefore done in "software".
| BlueToth wrote:
| They said that they implemented x86 ISA memory handling
| instructions, that substantially sped up the emulation. I
| don't remember exactly which now, but they explained this all
| in a WWDC video about the emulation.
| als0 wrote:
| Not instructions per se. Rosetta is a software based binary
| translator, and one of the most intensive parts about
| translating x86 to ARM is having to make sure all
| load/store instructions are strictly well ordered. To
| alleviate this pressure, Apple implemented the Total Store
| Ordering (TSO) feature in hardware, which makes sure that
| all ARM load and store instructions (transparently) follow
| the same memory ordering rules as x86.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| It is funny to hear sometimes though:
|
| "Apple created a chip which is not an X86! Its awesome!
| And the best thing about it is ... it does TSO does like
| an X86! Isn't that great?"
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Only some of the time.
|
| I think the last time I ran amd64 on my mac was months
| ago, a game.
| fweimer wrote:
| There's a Linux patch that exposes it via prctl: https://lo
| re.kernel.org/all/20240410211652.16640-1-zayd_qums...
|
| There's also the CFINV instruction (architectural, part of
| FEAT_FLAGM), which helps with emulating the x86-64 CMP
| instruction.
| izacus wrote:
| Apple didn't implement x86 ISA in hardware, they have a few
| instructions that change memory behaviour to make emulation
| faster.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Maybe if you find a company as small as Intel was at the time.
| BlueToth wrote:
| Intel customers required a second source supplier, i.e. IBM,
| thus, AMD was providing that for Intel in the beginning. Then
| later on AMD created the x86 64bit commands, which Intel
| adopted from AMD so now both share the same ISA.
| izacus wrote:
| Can you explain what you tried so say with that?
|
| Customer needs don't really matter in cases where monopolist
| (ab)uses the law to kill competition. That's the MAIN reason
| why monopolies are problematic.
| debugnik wrote:
| The "required" in that sentence should be read strictly:
| some customers, mainly governmental, wouldn't have bought
| Intel chips in the first place without access to
| alternative suppliers (AMD and previously VIA). Intel had
| to give in.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I read GP to mean that Intel had strong incentive to
| cooperate in order to make the initial sale. That's where
| the customer need was relevant.
| zenethian wrote:
| Neither company were like they are now back then. Intel
| needed a second supplier for their chips because nobody
| trusted manufacturing from a single source provider.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Seems like an interesting story, Ashawna - she was about 25 at
| the time, and as per Wikipedia, already worked on the military
| projects - the Sprint Missile System, and was at Xerox.
|
| > The processor was reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim
| Hailey and Jay Kumar. The Haileys photographed a pre-production
| sample Intel 8080 on their last day in Xerox, and developed a
| schematic and logic diagrams from the ~400 images.
| htrp wrote:
| > Am9080 variants ran at up to 4.0 MHz
|
| Definitely read that wrong the first time I skimmed the article
| bhasi wrote:
| "Behind every successful fortune there is a crime."
|
| - Mario Puzo, The Godfather
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| AMD was already in the CPU market with bit-slice LSI chips, the
| Am2900 set of chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900
|
| Those worked in 4-bit slices, and you could use them as LEGO
| blocks to build your own design (e.g. 8, 12 ou 16 bits) with much
| fewer parts than using standard TTL gates (or ECL NANDs, if you
| were Seymour Cray).
|
| The 1980 Mick & Brick book _Bit-slice Microprocessor Design_
| later gathered together some "application notes" - the
| cookbooks/crib sheets that semiconductor companies wrote and
| provided to get buyers/engineers started after the spec sheets.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > AMD entered the CPU market with reverse-engineered Intel 8080
| clone 50 years ago
|
| Moral: Awesome productivity happens when IP doesn't get in the
| way.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| If I recall correctly, they were also licensed to produce some
| clones.
|
| I remember when in the early 90s the am386-40MHz came out.
| Everyone was freaking out how we are now breaking the sound
| barrier. There was a company Twinhead(?) that came out with
| these 386-40Mhz motherboards with buses so overclocked most
| video cards would fry. Only the mono Hercules cards could
| survive. We thought our servers were the shizzle.
| fweimer wrote:
| Weren't legal protections for semiconductor masks rather lax
| in the 70s, at least in the United States? You might need
| certain patent licenses for the manufacturing process, but
| the chip itself was largely unprotected.
| rasz wrote:
| yep, thus intel going microcode and patent route.
| mrandish wrote:
| > "In the summer of 1973, during their last day working at
| Xerox, Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey, and Jay Kumar took
| detailed photos of an Intel 8080 pre-production sample"
|
| I was interested in this and followed the links to the
| original interview at: https://web.archive.org/web/20131111
| 155525/http://silicongen... which was interesting:
|
| > "Xerox being more of a theoretical company than a
| practical one let us spend a whole year taking apart all of
| the different microprocessors on the market at that time
| and reverse engineering them back to schematic. And the
| final thing that I did as a project was to, we had gotten a
| pre-production sample of the Intel 8080 and this was just
| as Kim and I were leaving the company. On the last day I
| took the part in and shot ten rolls of color film on the
| Leica that was attached to the lights microscope and then
| they gave us the exit interview and we went on our way. And
| so that summer we got a big piece of cardboard from the, a
| refrigerator came in and made this mosaic of the 8080. It
| was about 300 or 400 pictures altogether and we pieced it
| together, traced out all the logic and the transistors and
| everything and then decided to go to, go up North to
| Silicon Valley and see if there was anybody up there that
| wanted to know about that kind of technology. And I went to
| AMI and they said oh, we're interested, you come on as a
| consultant, but nobody seemed to be able to take the
| project seriously. And then I went over to a little company
| called Advanced Micro Devices and they wanted to, they
| thought they'd like to get into it because they had just
| developed an N-channel process and this was '73. And I
| asked them if they wanted to get into the microprocessor
| business because I had schematics and logic diagrams to the
| Intel 8080 and they said yes."
|
| From today's perspective, just shopping a design lifted
| directly from Intel CPU die shots around to valley semi
| companies sounds quite remarkable but it was a very
| different time then.
| dspillett wrote:
| That wasn't the first time they had similar products out-
| speeding Intel. I have the CPU from the first PC I owned
| tacked to the front of my current main PC with a Ryzen. That
| was clocked at 20MHz IIRC (I'm at parental home ATM so can't
| confirm) where the Intel units topped out at 12MHz (unless
| overclocked, or course).
| elif wrote:
| 100% agree. It's clearest to see in China. IP has been
| transformed from a mechanism to maintain competition and into a
| mechanism to maintain market control.
| gyomu wrote:
| Given that market control is one of the few ultimate gating
| factors that makes you thrive or die as a company, it's no
| surprise that anything that could be used as a mechanism to
| maintain market control would be.
| expedition32 wrote:
| European countries "acquired" quite a few Chinese trade
| secrets in the past. And from eachother to be fair.
|
| IP is one of those things you invent once you made it to the
| top.
| ck2 wrote:
| ah I remember those amazing days
|
| instant 20% speed boost replacing the IBM 8088 with the v20 chip
|
| bought a sleeve of them cheap and went around to all the PCs and
| popped them out
|
| only problem was software that relied on clocks ran too fast
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| >In 1975, AMD could make these processors for 50 cents and sell
| them for $700.
|
| Apparently by ripping off their military customers.
|
| >says Wikipedia.
|
| Why is that a primary source?
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