AMD annoyed...

[Robert G. Brown]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Schilling, Richard wrote:

> Robert,
>
> It's up to you, but I think the key is that you mention you have no existing
> agreement with AMD.  Without a non-disclosure on your work, then AMD has
> effectively given you permission to publish whatever you want.  You have to
> believe that they are aware of the implications of non-disclosure - they do
> this all the time with companies.  If you're concerned, call them to verify
> how they feel about it - they should be very open with you.  But, don't make
> a decision based on speculation (get an official ruling from the company).

Eventually I will, but I suspect that the company that gave me the
account as a courtesy (ASL) had a NDA with AMD and that their
non-publication restriction was not communicated between different
management levels of the company (and hence not to me -- if they had but
told me I would have been happy enough to comply anyway if that was a
condition of getting the account). I agree that AMD has no legal
recourse against me if I choose to publish at this point, but they might
well choose to punish the company that gave me the account.

Any old guys remember the National Lampoon cover:  "Buy this magazine or
we'll shoot this dog"?  Well, I have no particular desire for ASL to get
shot for being nice enough to give me an account.  Besides, I wasn't
finished -- some of the tests I was working on were producing the most
"interesting" results.  I'm not comfortable publishing these results
anyway without more work.

I have various things to do this week (including teach, as Duke has
started up again post-spring break).  One of them is to post the sources
used in the benchmarking for comment -- I've just started to add a link
to source packages into the

  http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/dual_athlon

site both as a resource and as an RFC.  When this task is completed I'll
try contacting AMD directly so they can look over the stuff I was
running (and any comments).  They can then run the tests themselves to
help them decide when it is "safe" to release me.  In the meantime, my
time isn't totally being wasted.

   rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu