The battle between Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices over terms of their second source agreement on the iAPX-86 family has become sharply more bitter, with Intel asking the arbitrator, Judge Barton Phelps in Santa Clara County Superior Court to allow it to terminate the agreement altogether, withdrawing AMD’s entitlement to make the 80286 and 80186 microprocessors and the 80C51 microcontroller. Intel claims that AMD has not lived up to its side of the 1982 agreement, which requires it to reciprocate with licences to parts of equal value. It says that the only such part for the iAPX-86 family was a hard disk controller that was anyway partly based on a chip of its own, and was late. It had accepted a 7110 modem transfer chip, but now wants to reject it, and is demanding that AMD be required to pay monetary damages and back royalties. AMD is counter-claiming for masks to the 8087, 80287, and 80387 maths chips as well as the 80386, and wants a whole string of chip designs accepted by Intel, most notably its prized new Am29000 32-bit RISC microprocessor. Others it is offering include the 9516 direct memory access transfer controller, 9513A timer, 81C80 video channel controller, 7970 compression expansion processor, 82958 optomagnetic disk controller and the modem chip. It also alleges that Intel wasted its time and misled it by saying that it planned to use n-well CMOS and telling AMD it should switch from p-well – and then going ahead with p-well without telling AMD. AMD wants $1,000m damages if the pact is rescinded, or $100m if it is awarded rights to the 80386 and the maths chips. An arbitration hearing is set for September 8.
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