Arctic Islands was apparently the code name for the RX400 series,so Arctic Sound sounds more of an AMD inspired code name,as Sound I assume in this case is meant to be a large sea or ocean inlet.
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Arctic Islands was apparently the code name for the RX400 series,so Arctic Sound sounds more of an AMD inspired code name,as Sound I assume in this case is meant to be a large sea or ocean inlet.
And why not?
All the cross licensing deal means for Intel is that they could use techniques covered by AMD patents, but those patents do not tell them everything they would need to know to successfully implement the technique.
Let's be generous to such a patent (probably very generous), and imagine that the patent has the kind of detail you might find in a good indepth technical review for instance of CPU architecture. Such articles can be quite detailed filled with things like cache topology, branch predictors, memory controller timings, etc.
But even armed with that, it is hard to imagine you could just hire 1000s of CPU engineers and duplicate the design. I'm sure most ideas which might end up in a design and which patent, have then had far more time and resource invested in them at the implementation stage than when they were though up.
Or I guess you could imagine it all being a 3-step process:
- design/plan
- implement
- debug
And while a cross licensing deal might you #1, most of the work was in steps #2 and #3.
There is a big gap between being able to use a patentable idea, and being able to come up with a patentable idea. Whether Intel copied graphics generation N is a moot point when AMD should internally be architecting generation N+3, implementing N+2 and debugging N+1 for release.