Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Tenchu]

Zeev, funny you should be talking about AMD. Can you respond to this statement made by Tim May on SI:

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=18273617

Remember, a company buying AMD would not acquire AMD's negotiated-then-courtroom-fought license to manufacture x86 chips. Companies like IBM and Fujitsu have had to negotiate separate arrangments, ones which never rose to the status of full second source agreements.

The nontransferrability of licensing agreements, generally, is one of the reasons AMD has not been snapped up by IBM or Sun or NEC when its market value fell below $2B. (I expect lawyers carefully scrutinized the terms of the Intel-AMD license, and then the decisions in the court case years later, for any indication that a company could be a fully-legal licensee merely by acquiring AMD.)

Without processors, AMD is just a debt-ridden maker of flash and SRAM and a handful of other chips.

Tenchu