Ok, so AMD was hot for a couple of years in the server market. I think you miss the point. That is not what drives the profits of a CPU maker. Profit is in the numbers, the mass numbers. Otherwise, why would AMD even bother with the home/business computing market? The server market supplements their profits, but without the mass market they can't run the fabs.
No, I don't miss the point. AMD is the tail and Intel is the dog, always has and always will be. The "old fashion" 32 bit chips which Intel dominated the market, with did just that, dominate the market.
*That* is the point. Linux may have had 64 bit support, but that could only run on 20% of the machines, so that means it was likely installed on what, maybe 1%,... less?Being the "driving force" means AMD designed the obvious extension to the 32 bit instructions which most likely anyone would have done, but otherwise means nothing. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can't patent typical instructions and you can't copyright hardware, so the only handle AMD even had on Intel were the mnemonics. I seem to recall that is why the Z80 instruction set is slightly different from the 8080 instruction set, but the opcodes are the same... with extensions.
The only instruction patent I know of is some feature of an ARM instruction that *requires* a particular piece of hardware to implement it. Otherwise anyone can duplicate the entire ARM instruction set other than that one interrupt feature. Or so I was told when someone had designed an ARM7 for FPGA. He did such a good job of it that ARM contacted him. He never said exactly what the discussion contained, but he pulled his design and went to work for ARM.
What's silly? I was trying to differentiate my statement from referring to the Itanium 64 bit instruction set. I was making no statement about the Intel x86-64 instructions vs. the AMD instructions. The Itanium instructions were the "old" 64 bit instructions, the x86 compatible instructions were the "new" 64 bit instructions.