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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

#141

Post by bfe »

KevinIsMyName wrote: post #124
amorphid wrote: post #26

Attorneys on both sides must be excited on some level about the potential number of billable hours it'd take to litigate a case like this. Reminds me of a something an entrepreneurship professor told me... If there's one lawyer in town, they drive a Chevrolet. If there are two lawyers in town, they both drive Cadillacs.

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.

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

#142

Post by chris_wot »

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.

Hope they don't violate any patents in this process.

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

#145

Post by SBArbeit »

chris_wot wrote: post #143

Windows still has a HAL, makes me wonder why Microsoft don't just cut a new HAL for the ARM. It's quite possible I'm missing something vital here, of course.

They have a HAL for ARM, this is to allow x86 programs to run on top of that HAL. That's what Intel is attacking.

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

#146

Post by mrpippy »

wfunction wrote: post #61

Can someone explain this: > AMD made SSE2 a mandatory part of its 64-bit AMD64 extension, which means that virtually every chip that's been sold over the last decade or more will include SSE2 support. [...] That's a problem, because the SSE family is also new enough—the various SSE extensions were introduced between 1999 and 2007—that any patents covering it will still be in force. AMD64 requires SSE2 which was intro…

Worth noting that Microsoft's emulator is only emulating x86, not AMD64 (at least not yet)

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

#147

Post by mrpippy »

comex wrote: post #113
dboreham wrote: post #79

Logically this implies that I can't execute some i386 binary that I possess without infringing Intel patents. I think this theory of infringement has to run into various thought-experiment problems such as : can I auto-translate that binary into some other instruction set, then execute the translated binary, without infringing Intel patents? (yes, surely) Is the translator now infringing Intel patents because it has…

If you execute your i386 binary on an Intel, AMD, or other licensed processor, then you're protected by the doctrine of exhaustion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_intellectual_pro... If you execute it in an emulator, though, all bets are off...

Here's an insane idea--what if every Win10 ARM laptop also included a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP chip (from a junked PC) glued inside the case? Would the x86 patent rights from that chip cover an emulator running on the ARM?

(I'm pretty sure it's a no, but an Aereo-esque lawsuit arguing the opposite would be fun to watch)

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

#148

Post by wfunction »

mrpippy wrote: post #146
wfunction wrote: post #61

Can someone explain this: > AMD made SSE2 a mandatory part of its 64-bit AMD64 extension, which means that virtually every chip that's been sold over the last decade or more will include SSE2 support. [...] That's a problem, because the SSE family is also new enough—the various SSE extensions were introduced between 1999 and 2007—that any patents covering it will still be in force. AMD64 requires SSE2 which was intro…

Worth noting that Microsoft's emulator is only emulating x86, not AMD64 (at least not yet)

I definitely didn't know. Are you sure about this/do you have a link?

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

#149

Post by mrpippy »

kev009 wrote: post #132

IBM sold an x86 translation for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVM_Lx86 . Would be interesting to know why it was discontinued.

That is odd. IBM bought Transitive and owns the tech (so no ongoing license fees to pay) and I would thimk that x86 binary support for POWER would still be a useful migration tool.

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

#150

Post by gsg »

pcwalton wrote: post #84
rayiner wrote: post #62

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.

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…

Immediates are a bit of a mix. mov doesn't have very nice encodings, but many instructions do: push $1 is 2 bytes, addl $2, %eax is only 3 bytes.

There's no question that x86-64 could be improved on in terms of code density.

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