171–180 of 234 posts
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
I'll just sit hear eating my popcorn and waiting for a lowRISC computer I can buy.
However, if you're interested in embedded hardware, you can buy a RISC-V chip from SiFive now.
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…
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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.
Sounds pretty close to owning math. I call addition!
So now, if the same algorithm is implemented in software to emulate X86 platform on ARM, how is that not infringing on the patent?
May someone please elaborate on the difference between what MS does and emulators on Linux like Quemu and ExaGear?
The difference, as it pertains to the patent issue, is nothing technical - it's simply that Intel feels threatened by Microsoft's emulator and not by qemu. (Though if Intel has ever redistributed qemu, there may be an additional GPL wrinkle...)
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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.
But this is logic bordering to philosophy, which isn't exactly what the courts love to argue about. They look at intents and damages.
My guess is that a simple 'I sell X using my patents, they also sell X but are not paying" is vastly more likely to succeed. "But, but, Church-Turing" will just piss them off.
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Intel uses that for their x86 Android devices - and as far as I know, ARM did not sue.
Intel also makes arm processors (a cortex a5 i think?); perhaps they do license it.
Keep in mind the most relevant instruction set is the X86-64 instruction set (32 bit code is not very relevant these days). The x86-64 ISA was created by AMD, not Intel. Intel was busy trying to milk the enterprise market with the Itanium, trying to reserve 64 bit as an enterprise feature.
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They had contracts so Samsung was bound and Apple did start using their own chips, so it's not at all certain that the law suit didn't further disturb the business relation.
I believe their chips continue to use samsung fabs today.
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Sounds pretty close to owning math. I call addition!
Hmmm. So for example, a strength of X86 is that all reads and writes are synchronized by design, guaranteed by hardware. So if two threads call a write instruction, those instructions are guaranteed to happen in the order they were written in. You have no such guarantee on ARM. What's more, Intel has a patent for this. So now, if the same algorithm is implemented in software to emulate X86 platform on ARM, how is tha…
maybe thats a difficult problem for hardware to solve. for software, thats just how software works.
maple is solving differential equations and that may have at some point been difficult to write software for. if they have a patent for that, then so be it. I start a company that hires professors who are really good at solving differential equations, and sell the results. basically what maple yields, except produced in a different way. am i infringing on the patent?
patents patent technology. not results. you cant have a patent for "a rocket that flies to the moon" in the sense that now nobody else can build rockets flying to the moon. you can have a patent for a way to store liquid oxygen in tanks to make it yield the energy required to get a rocket to the moon. patenting concepts of things you want to do is at least morally wrong.
a hardware patent should not be capable of preventing someone from writing software that does the same thing.
its like patenting a drug that cures cancer and then using that patent to prevent oncologists from curing cancer by applying chemotherapy.