Set up in October 2024, the advisory group brings together the chip giants and their ecosystem hangers-on in a quest to standardise features and soothe the headache of developers wrestling with inconsistent CPU behaviour.

Both firms are now pushing out four key features as joint technical milestones, presumably in a show of harmony that makes the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street feel warm inside.

With it comes shedloads of acronyms such as FRED which stands for Flexible Return and Event Delivery, which promises a less creaky interrupt model. Then there's AVX10, the next-gen vector instruction set extension, which is apparently more portable and throughput-friendly.

AMD and Intel hyped ChkTag, a memory-tagging scheme meant to snuff out bugs like buffer overflows and use-after-free nasties. It includes hardware support but doesn’t break compatibility if your kit doesn’t have it, which sounds surprisingly sensible.

Then there is ACE, or Advanced Matrix Extensions, a standard for matrix multiplication that lets developers do maths faster across everything from bargain laptops to datacentre beasts.

Despite the unlikely pairing, the two chipmakers insist this is all part of their "shared commitment" to make the x86 platform less chaotic and more secure. They say they’ll focus on roping in more ISVs, cooking up more instruction set extensions, and generally trying to keep x86 from spiralling into fragmentation hell.