161–170 of 234 posts
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I definitely didn't know. Are you sure about this/do you have a link?
Yeah, it's been mentioned in all the posts. I assume it was enough work just to get x86 working, and there's almost no 64-bit-only Windows software (certainly nothing you would want to run emulated). "only 32-bit x86 support is being offered" http://www.anandtech.com/show/10889/microsoft-and-qualcomm-b...
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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…
I thought the primary reason Windows RT sucked was it's reliance on the horrendously terrible Windows Store? You couldn't even recompile popular apps if you wanted to, you had to port them to the store system. Unless you were MS, then you could grant yourself an exception and let stuff run direct (Office).
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…
Unless the case is presided by Judge Alsup, who learnt to write Java programs during Oracle v. Google.
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…
> their warning could backfire if it gives Microsoft one more reason to finally walk away from x86 compatibility Emulation is an important part of walking away, no? Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility above anything else.
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> 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.
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…
> Patents expire after 17 years That's under the old law. Nowadays, for patents that issue from original applications filed on or after June 8, 1995, it's 20 years from the earliest filing date upon which priority is claimed (possibly extended to account for delays in the USPTO). [0] AFAIK, most foreign countries follow the same rule — which is significant, because when one big company sues another for patent infring…
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http://x-r.ai/ is working on a patent attorney AI to automate a lot of patent attorney work to resolve patent disputes more quickly and cheaply.
Hope they don't violate any patents in this process.
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Nope, an abstract idea has always been invalid. Alice vs CLS Bank found that "on a computer" wasn't a sufficient inventive step to transform an abstract idea into something patentable [1]. This can be used to invalidate a claim, but won't shrink the scope of a claim to hardware only (as then, if software was the only inventive step, it would be a pure abstract idea). The USPTO certainly seems to think an ISA is paten…
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean if you have a patent that includes hardware, then that patent would prevent emulating the hardware in software? Wouldn't any software patent then be possible, by the simple expedient of describing it in the patent application as running on a custom single-purpose hardware device?
Yes, any software patent is possible by describing it as running on a processor. See for example [1], which has the very common claim prefix of "A machine readable storage medium storing a computer program..." Alice doesn't invalidate these patents unless, by removing that text, the remainder of the claim is unpatentable.
Because software patents are still legal, there's no need to attempt to describe them as running on a custom hardware device - you just specify them as software. Specifying custom hardware would unnecessarily reduce the scope of your claim.
Alright, I'll come out of retirement to hit this dead horse another lick. "if WinARM can run Wintel software but still offer lower prices, better battery life, lower weight, or similar, Intel's dominance of the laptop space is no longer assured." Peter. My man. I laughed. I cried. For the millionth time, the ARM ISA does not magically confer any sort of performance or efficiency advantage, at least not that matters i…
You missed the price point of ARM SOC which is many times cheaper then Intel's offering.