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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

#101

Post by wtallis »

kakarot wrote: post #51
amalcon wrote: post #15

Years ago, I spoke with an attorney with a CS background. He had once worked on a case like this. Sharp guy. He didn't tell me the parties involved, and I didn't ask, though I assume he wouldn't speak openly about it while it was ongoing. I therefore don't know how it turned out. It was many years ago, so I might be remembering wrong. I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice (neither mine nor his). Basically, there…

One has to wonder why this approach hasn't been successful in litigation against game console emulator developers.

How many suits against console emulators have gone to trial? I would think nobody who makes or sells console hardware actually wants to risk such a case going to trial, because the best case is that they win and can't recover any meaningful damages, but the worst case outcome is that they establish precedent that the emulator is legal.

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

#103

Post by yuhong »

rayiner wrote: post #80
_delirium wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the opposite of my impression of their history. Intel's approach to x86 historically has been asserting that it's basically impossible to implement a clone due to their patents, which they aggressively asserted to keep any competitors out of the market entirely if possible, and restricted to older ISA features if not possible. With the main exception of AMD, which was initially given patent licenses and tolera…

Intel has engaged in some strategic patent litigation over the years, but if you look at the chart in the article, it looks like there has been a big push to get more ISA patents in the last several years.

Intel has patented x86 for a long time now though. VME, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, and even long NOPs were all patented for example (now all expired).

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

#104

Post by drakenot »

kakarot wrote: post #91
throwaway91111 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly because emulators didn't provide a source of potential licensing revenue—they're all free.

Some devs are making quite a bit on their Patreons right now through donations. https://www.patreon.com/cemu https://www.patreon.com/Nekotekina 2 of the more well-known dev teams.

Interesting. I wonder why there is such a disparity between CEMU (building a Wii U emulator) getting $28k/mo and Nekotekina getting $1.2k/mo (building a PS3 emulator).

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

#105

Post by eonwe »

dpark wrote: post #86
rayiner wrote: post #59

This marks a distinct shift for Intel. Historically, Intel's IP approach has focused on trade secrets, because they had a huge advantage in manufacturing and implementation techniques that are not easily reverse-engineered. Patent-protecting x86 didn't make much sense during the long period where nobody could make a general-purpose CPU as fast as Intel running native code, much less while emulating x86. As Moore's la…

> All on non-Intel foundry processes. That was unimaginable 10 years ago. Not really. 15 years ago, AMD was outperforming Intel at a lower price.

That was not because of foundry process, but because of better architecture. Intel was leading or tied at process width and clock speed the whole time.

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

#106

Post by thristian »

kakarot wrote: post #51
amalcon wrote: post #15

Years ago, I spoke with an attorney with a CS background. He had once worked on a case like this. Sharp guy. He didn't tell me the parties involved, and I didn't ask, though I assume he wouldn't speak openly about it while it was ongoing. I therefore don't know how it turned out. It was many years ago, so I might be remembering wrong. I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice (neither mine nor his). Basically, there…

One has to wonder why this approach hasn't been successful in litigation against game console emulator developers.

Most of the classic consoles didn't have patents covering their architecture. For example, the NES had a patent covering the security chip on every game cartridge, but since the chip was a purely hardware thing that didn't affect the operation of the game software, NES emulators happily ignore the whole thing.

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

#107

Post by amalcon »

ouid wrote: post #64
amalcon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right that it expands upon the C-T thesis a bit, so my use of the word "literally" was incorrect. It does depend on the C-T thesis though, because it relies on a definition of "processor" that references it. You'd still need to explain it to a judge.

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

#108

Post by clouddrover »

someSven wrote: post #102

May someone please elaborate on the difference between what MS does and emulators on Linux like Quemu and ExaGear?

Here's a Microsoft Channel 9 video in which they talk about the x86 emulation layer:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171

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

#109

Post by bogomipz »

rayiner wrote: post #94
bogomipz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what is meant by "optimizations leaking out"? I am not familiar with this term. Thanks.

Like, implementation details that leak out into the architecture for optimization reasons. Classic example is branch delay slots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_slot .

Thanks this is very interesting.

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

#110

Post by besselheim »

kccqzy wrote: post #87
pcwalton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yeah, ARM has one nasty architectural optimization leaking out: the program counter register being 8 bytes ahead of where it should be due to pipelining. Thankfully that got fixed up in AArch64, and if 32-bit mode gets dropped down the line (which is allowed by the architecture) it'll be a thing of the past. x86 has some architectural leaks too, though: the aliasing of the MMX and FP stacks as a hack for compatibi…

Regarding 5, no, it's five bytes (b8 01 00 00 00) for movl $1,%eax. If you actually have a 64-bit immediate, just the immediate itself would be 8 bytes, and the actual instruction is 10 bytes.

MOV RAX, 1 is seven bytes: 48 C7 C0 01 00 00 00
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