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Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

arstechnica.com

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Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#61

Post by wfunction »

Can someone explain this:

> AMD made SSE2 a mandatory part of its 64-bit AMD64 extension, which means that virtually every chip that's been sold over the last decade or more will include SSE2 support. [...] That's a problem, because the SSE family is also new enough—the various SSE extensions were introduced between 1999 and 2007—that any patents covering it will still be in force.

AMD64 requires SSE2 which was introduced in 2001, right? So isn't it just 1 year until Microsoft can put in what's required for the AMD64 architecture?

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#62

Post by rayiner »

pcwalton wrote: post #54
blazespin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair Intel has done a lot of work to make the x86 as great as possible. Patent lawsuits are awful. I'm not sure just copying someone's technology and emulating it without paying a license fee is all that great either. My guess is this is all just negotiation from Microsoft's point of view and they are just trying to get Intel to license the ability to emulate x86. Another possibility is this is a way to get Int…

Emulation is only an implementation of the ISA. The x86 ISA is hardly "as great as possible". In fact, it's downright crummy: x86-64 is as bloated as RISC architectures usually are without any of RISC's benefits. At best you can make the argument that x86 has done well in spite of the ISA, not because of it. The silicon-level implementation is another matter entirely, of course--but emulation has nothing to do with t…

x86-64 is a perfectly acceptable ISA. Strong memory ordering, no architectural optimizations leaking out like branch delay slots or stack windows. Pretty good i-cache efficiency through the use of two-address code and memory operands. Of course, Intel didn't have much to do with it. Most of it is either an accident of history or the work of AMD, who a lot of work regularizing the ISA in the 64-bit transition.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#63

Post by bitwize »

geon wrote: post #60
blazespin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair Intel has done a lot of work to make the x86 as great as possible. Patent lawsuits are awful. I'm not sure just copying someone's technology and emulating it without paying a license fee is all that great either. My guess is this is all just negotiation from Microsoft's point of view and they are just trying to get Intel to license the ability to emulate x86. Another possibility is this is a way to get Int…

> Intel has done a lot of work > copying someone's technology and emulating it without paying a license fee You are contradicting yourself. Intel built an instruction set for hardware. Emulating it on an ARM would completely negate the usefulness of it. There is no copying, since the emulator is built on software. The patents concern hardware design, not software. The whole case should be laughable. It shouldn't even…

No.

If they're anything like the Itanium ISA patents, then Intel owns the rights to the instructions themselves and their meanings. Emulation would be infringing.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#64

Post by ouid »

amalcon wrote: post #24
ouid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it's Church Turing you're arguing, then Intel surely doesn't hold the patent on the whole equivalence class...

The argument is that anything with that equivalence is a processor, which means an emulator is a processor, which means that any patent thats mentions the word "processor" (or equivalent) covers the emulator if it would cover the emulated device. The argument is not that the patent covers all processors.

that's not the church turing thesis then.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#65

Post by cwyers »

rayiner wrote: post #62
pcwalton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emulation is only an implementation of the ISA. The x86 ISA is hardly "as great as possible". In fact, it's downright crummy: x86-64 is as bloated as RISC architectures usually are without any of RISC's benefits. At best you can make the argument that x86 has done well in spite of the ISA, not because of it. The silicon-level implementation is another matter entirely, of course--but emulation has nothing to do with t…

x86-64 is a perfectly acceptable ISA. Strong memory ordering, no architectural optimizations leaking out like branch delay slots or stack windows. Pretty good i-cache efficiency through the use of two-address code and memory operands. Of course, Intel didn't have much to do with it. Most of it is either an accident of history or the work of AMD, who a lot of work regularizing the ISA in the 64-bit transition.

Microsoft isn't emulating x86-64, so far this is 32-bit only.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#66

Post by ue_ »

bitwize wrote: post #63
geon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel has done a lot of work > copying someone's technology and emulating it without paying a license fee You are contradicting yourself. Intel built an instruction set for hardware. Emulating it on an ARM would completely negate the usefulness of it. There is no copying, since the emulator is built on software. The patents concern hardware design, not software. The whole case should be laughable. It shouldn't even…

No. If they're anything like the Itanium ISA patents, then Intel owns the rights to the instructions themselves and their meanings. Emulation would be infringing.

I'm a little ignorant on this, but how can you own the rights to instructions? Isn't that the same as owning the rights to an API, or the naming and operation of functions? I mean, would I be infringing if I re-implemented the C standard library, or the standard library of some language with a copyrighted spec?

How can you even patent something like that? It goes beyond software patents, as it appears to me. But again, I'm very ignorant of this.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#67

Post by gaius »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #43
Deinos wrote: post #23

The article mentions Cyrix as a "victim" of Intel patent defense; however, Cyrix not only won their lawsuits, but they also went after Intel for patent violations in the Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/84...

"If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined", as someone once remarked.

Like Ireland almost bankrupted by repeatedly winning the Eurovision Song Contest and having to host it the following year.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#68

Post by qb45 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #12
natch wrote: post #6

Patents expire after 17 years and x86 is 39 years old, so any of the original patents must have expired twice over already. They no doubt have been filing additional patents over the years. But I'm sure MS and Qualcomm have plenty of their own patents to bargain with. Also their warning could backfire if it gives Microsoft one more reason to finally walk away from x86 compatibility... not that this is likely to happe…

TFA specifically mentions SSE, AVX, TSX, and SGX. All of those have had new features added in the last year or two.

Of these I think only SSE is really important. AVX is relatively new (2011) and most software likely can handle CPUs/emulators which lack it. TSX and SGX are Intel-only so any software that can run on AMD doesn't need them.

Re: Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield

#70

Post by __s »

zeta0134 wrote: post #19
make3 wrote: post #4

How did I not already know Microsoft had a working x86 emulator.. this is a massive game changer for the laptop space if it's fast and reliable enough, as afaik ARM chips are so much more power efficient for similar perf

There are several existing and excellent x86 emulators floating around. In the open source space, QEMU is quite fantastic and well supported. I'm not surprised at all that Microsoft managed to either develop one in house, or acquire one. x86 is an old and very well understood architecture at this point. The difficulty thus isn't in writing a working emulator, it's in figuring out which features you can support from a…

The huge tech thing here is that running Windows-on-ARM you can run x86 programs which can then call into the Windows-on-ARM OS. So no need to virtualize the OS
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