Intel Reverse-Engineered AMD64

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Just spotted this bit of Info over at ExtremeTech!

After investigating the instruction sets used by 64-bit chips from AMD and Intel, an industry analyst has concluded that Intel reverse-engineered the AMD64 instruction set to create its own 64-bit microprocessor architecture.

Tom Halfhill, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR in San Jose, said Monday that he had compared the instruction sets of AMD's 64-bit chips, called AMD64, with the 64-bit extensions to be used in the Intel Xeon processor and future desktop chips. The smoking gun, Halfhill said, was Intel's choice to mimic a decision AMD made in its early Opteron designs, and later reversed.

Intel Reverse-Engineered AMD64