Why Intel and AMD buried their differences to make life easier for software developers, and hold off a common enemy

It's hard to think of any technology first introduced in Studio 54's heyday that plays such a central role in today's enterprise tech world as the x86 instruction set, the marching orders for server chips built by Intel and AMD.

Despite recent challenges to their hegemony, x86 chips still power the vast majority of cloud and on-premises servers in use today. However, over all those years Intel and AMD tweaked x86 in subtle but incompatible ways to suit their own needs, which can cause problems for software developers.

Putting aside decades of differences (including one major antitrust lawsuit) Intel and AMD announced the formation of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Tuesday at the Open Compute Conference, promising to standardize the technology at the heart of their most important products.

With major partners such as Dell, Google Cloud, HPE, Lenovo, and Microsoft (and the noticeable absence of AWS), the group will work together "to shape the future of x86 and foster developer innovation through a more unified set of instructions and architectural interfaces," they said in a statement.

Intel invented x86 way back in 1978 with the development of the 8086 chip, and AMD was granted a license to become a second supplier to the growing PC market in 1984.

Right now, "x86 is led architecturally by Intel, and any alignment with AMD is achieved primarily between x86 ISVs," according to Patrick Moorhead, a longtime chip industry executive and analyst. The group's goal is to ensure that everyone is working with one standardized version of x86 while also allowing outsiders to influence the future direction of the technology, rather than Intel more-or-less controlling the roadmap.

Several changes in the chip market led Intel and AMD to this historic partnership. One of them is the rise of alternative instruction sets such as Arm, which runs the chips found in nearly every mobile phone in the world.

Arm has made serious inroads into the data center over the last five to six years, starting with the introduction of AWS's Graviton processor in 2018, and now every major cloud provider has unveiled its own Arm CPU. "Part of Arm's rise stems from rules in its contracts that all Arm chips be able to run all Arm software, regardless of who made the chip," Reuters noted.

Most software written for x86 chips can run on either Intel or AMD's designs, but each company has added custom instructions to their chips over the years that have "caused some inefficiencies and some drift in portions of the ISA [instruction set architecture] over time," AMD's Forrest Norrod told Tom's Hardware.

But while the need for a solution to those problems has been discussed for years, it took a substantial blow to Intel's dominance over the enterprise server market to get to this point. It's impossible to imagine the Intel of a decade ago, which commanded more than 90% of the market for data-center processors, agreeing to share directional control over one of its most important assets with its archrival and its customers.

One day before Intel introduced the new group, it began laying off 15,000 workers in response to the myriad financial problems it has rung up over the last several years, "the biggest downsizing in its five-decade history," according to The Oregonian. Meanwhile, AMD has increased its share of the server market to 24%, "its highest server market share in decades."

Given that so much software running the world has been written for x86 chips, Intel will still be a major player in the data-center market for years to come if it can fix its financial situation and get its manufacturing and product-design strategies back on track. And no matter how it got here, Intel deserves credit for doing the right thing by server buyers and software developers in trying to make sure x86 stays vibrant into its fifth decade.