Rumours concerning Samsung acquisition of AMD circulate again

[directhex]

Isn't the US protectionist, in that they would prefer another US company to buy AMD rather than a foreign company like Samsung? I'm just trying to think of the last significant sized US firm that got bought by a foreign company.

That's certainly been Apple's main weapon in patent cases with Samsung - stressing the foreignness of Samsung in front of a jury

[DanceswithUnix]

it's pretty clear from the stategies at AMD and Intel that high performance CPU cores are actually a niche product now. The AMD64 market is likely to be stable for a while yet: there's plenty of legacy software still in use that people will need backwards compatibility for. Just as long as no-one finds a way to virtualise AMD64 on ARM with decent performance....

DEC Alpha, probably still the best CPU architecture out there, was able to emulate x86 code in software faster than the best Pentiums of the time, and had native Windows support for non legacy code. None of that helped.

AMD made only minor and temporary inroads into Intel's market share for all the years that they had a superior CPU.

Intel spent a huge amount of money to make sure that the dominant 64 bit platform was Itanium, including hardware assisted emulation of x86. Well I certainly only ever saw Itanium boxes running Unix, and in the end Microsoft told Intel to adopt AMD64.

So if even Intel can't break the x86 market, I really think we have to accept that Windows is an Intel only x86 thing. I do wonder if Intel had pushed Alpha (which they now own all rights to and just abandoned) rather than Itanium they might have succeeded, but I suspect even that would have ultimately failed.

[3dcandy]

It's just never that easy - people will always buy Pentium, Intel or whatever as it's the market leader same as they will always believe in the mhz hype. Bigger is better, right?
Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you plug and hype a product it is just not what the consumer desires and buys