91–100 of 234 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One has to wonder why this approach hasn't been successful in litigation against game console emulator developers.
Possibly because emulators didn't provide a source of potential licensing revenue—they're all free.
https://www.patreon.com/Nekotekina
2 of the more well-known dev teams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 agai…
Patents are entirely unlike copyright in this, in that you can come up with a totally independent implementation, and still infringe the patent. The patents are very similar to audio or video codec patents - for example, they patent the process of executing a particular instruction. For example, here's Intel's (expired) patent on the CPUID instruction: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5671435A It claims the partic…
There is, however, the Doctrine of Equivalents. This says that if something uses different elements / components from what's in the actual claims, it could still be argued to infringe the patent if those elements perform a role equivalent to the elements in the claims. But I'm not quite sure how far that could be stretched.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you elaborate on what is meant by "optimizations leaking out"? I am not familiar with this term. Thanks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patents are entirely unlike copyright in this, in that you can come up with a totally independent implementation, and still infringe the patent. The patents are very similar to audio or video codec patents - for example, they patent the process of executing a particular instruction. For example, here's Intel's (expired) patent on the CPUID instruction: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5671435A It claims the partic…
I read the claims of that patent, and they are all hardware claims. As in, the claims are literally in terms of registers in a CPU. I would imagine in an emulator would have data structures in memory to represent these registers, but it won't directly infringe these claims as written. There is , however, the Doctrine of Equivalents. This says that if something uses different elements / components from what's in the a…
"A computer system coupled to receive and respond to computer instructions from a program routine comprising"
In later patents, they got even more clever and just say a "method" rather than a "processor", and explicitly define registers as potentially being emulated in the description (search AVX2 patents if you're curious)
Well, since x86 is a monopoly ... Intel oughta go easy on this one.
The whole idea behind patents is that they are legal monopolies backed up with guns.
I would love for a real lawyer to explain this tortured logic.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD has a (non-transferable!) license to do so.
I wonder if this kept AMD alive during the hard times. x86 isn't going away for the next 10 years or longer.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel would argue (semi-sanely) that there's no monopoly on CPUs. You can make your own mips, arm, it even Risc-V CPUs. Also that they cross license x86 with competitors.
Were there any new licensees in the last 15 years? Nvidia reportedly had issues getting the necessary paperwork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver#History