Re: 40 year old tech....
The patents cover SSE and AVX specifically, and are the reason why AMD introduced their '3DNow!' instructions instead of SSE - Intel didn't grant them a patent license for SSE. When AMD introduced their 64 bit extension, obviously Intel needed access to that, so they signed a full cross license which is why AMD was able to support Intel's SIMD implementations of SSE and AVX and drop 3DNow!