Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 234 posts

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

#191

Post by gaius »

markrages wrote: post #13
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…

> 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.

Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility above anything else.

Yes and no. If you're buying a managed service - like Azure HDinsight say - why do you care or even need to know what's under it? The volume buyers of CPUs now are the big cloud operators. If you're buying a tablet and consuming "apps", then why do you care about compatibility with old Windows desktop applications?

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

#192

Post by _delirium »

tinus_hn wrote: post #182
_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…

It's kind of difficult to believe this when the relevant architecture of today (x64) was developed by AMD. X86 is ancient, any patents that can't be avoided would have expired years ago.

AMD included a number of Intel ISA components like SSE2 in AMD64, which was ok for them because AMD has a patent cross-license with Intel, but means it's still a patent minefield to implement it.

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

#193

Post by ZenoArrow »

zekevermillion wrote: post #183
ZenoArrow wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't see it happening in the next decade. However, if you're interested in embedded hardware, you can buy a RISC-V chip from SiFive now. https://www.sifive.com/#

Next decade?! That long???

Yes.

x86 is dominant for desktops/laptops. ARM is starting to make inroads with Chromebooks and covers the low end. RISC V is starting from scratch, both in terms of available hardware and software support. If RISC V can quickly prove popular in the embedded space then perhaps we'd see a desktop/laptop earlier than in a decade, but it's a competitive market.

To give a comparison, MIPS is popular in the embedded space, but how many MIPS-based laptops have their been? Very few.

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

#194

Post by rayiner »

bfe wrote: post #141
KevinIsMyName wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume lawyers on both sides have already hands full of work. I imagine these huge corporations spend lots of money on legal.

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.

Is there a version that works? Really interested in trying it.

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

#195

Post by dTal »

jonstokes wrote: post #131

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…

Nobody said anything about performance/watt. It doesn't have to be more efficient. It only has to draw less power, most of the time. And most of the time you're staring at a computer screen, you're not asking it to do anything - you're reading, or thinking about what to type next. So idle power is the most relevant predictor of battery life for a mobile chipset. And ARM definitely has the advantage there.

As well as weighing less and being cheaper. So there's no call for laughing and crying.

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

#196

Post by cesarb »

netheril96 wrote: post #178
sliken wrote: post #162

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.

That is not true on Windows, where most software is either 32 bit only, or both 32 and 64 bit. In fact, for many software on Windows, the 64 bit port is considered beta versions.

> In fact, for many software on Windows, the 64 bit port is considered beta versions.

That's probably due to Microsoft's choice of keeping both "int" and "long" as 32 bits while pointers increased to 64 bits, unlike everyone else which kept "int" as 32 bits and increased "long" to 64 bits. If any part of your program stored a pointer in a "long", it would break when the memory allocator gave you an address above 4G. You have to carefully comb your code to change the relevant variables to things like LONG_PTR (which isn't a "long" on 64-bit Windows) instead.

Storing a pointer in a long is probably common in 32-bit Windows, since window messages have a pair of parameters, WPARAM (which, despite its name, was an "int") and LPARAM (which was a "long"); pointers are often passed in LPARAM.

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

#197

Post by youdontknowtho »

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…

Intel chips have been RISC-like internally for years. They have an instruction decode stage that converts x86 instructions into an internal ISA that's more RISC-ish.

Ars Technica, as always, has the details of how that has evolved over the years. Can't remember when the article in question was written, though.

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

#198

Post by payne92 »

It will be interesting to see how this strategy fares in the US, given the Alice ruling which made it much harder to patent methods that were purely software.

Intel's strategy of going after other hardware companies may not translate neatly to emulators.

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

#199

Post by Malician »

emodendroket wrote: post #186
wayn3 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how can it possibly infringe on any kind of patent to "promise that commands are executed in order". 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…

There seems to be a lot of mingling here of the way things ought to be and the way they are.

Reminds me of a list of "copyright myths" I saw in school.

The first nine were, "you think you can do this simple thing, this reasonable thing, or have any freedom whatsoever? SCREW YOU."

The tenth claimed it was a myth that copyright levied oppressive burdens on the consumer.

Lesson: With any type of intellectual property protection, you can usually just presume it works in the most totally disgusting way imaginable.

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

#200

Post by jonstokes »

dTal wrote: post #195
jonstokes wrote: post #131

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…

Nobody said anything about performance/watt. It doesn't have to be more efficient . It only has to draw less power, most of the time . And most of the time you're staring at a computer screen, you're not asking it to do anything - you're reading, or thinking about what to type next. So idle power is the most relevant predictor of battery life for a mobile chipset. And ARM definitely has the advantage there. As well a…

I would try to engage with this but you don't seem to have even a basic grasp of sleep modes, background processes, idle power, power efficiency measurements, or pretty much anything that I wrote about in my comment. You haven't given me much to work with, here.
Post reply on HN