221–230 of 234 posts
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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.
Is there a version that works? Really interested in trying it.
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…
What if it doesn't emulate x86 on the fly, but reassembles the binary for the target architecture? This obviously won't work in many cases, but should be fine for run-of-the-mill business software, which is what Microsoft is mostly targeting.
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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.
Almost everything that you described is microarchitectural, and not tied to the ISA.
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By my math, 39 years ago is prior to 1995. But yes for patents issued later than 1995, good point, thanks for the correction.
For the benefit of anyone still reading, I'll work through an example. + Intel released the 8086 on June 8, 1978 [0]. Tech companies typically file U.S. patent applications just before the first public disclosure of the new technology, so as to preserve any available rights under non-U.S. patent law [1]. So let's assume that Intel filed one of its 8086 patent applications on June 7, 1978. + Let's also assume that it…
+ Right now it's 2017 [0].
+ 2017 > 1998 [1]. In fact it has been 6,944 or 6,945 days since June 7, 1998, depending on (i) your time zone and (ii) how you do your math. [2]
+ Moot facts are moot [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater-than_sign
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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.
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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.
Almost everything that you described is microarchitectural, and not tied to the ISA.
They listed these features 'strong memory ordering', '(no) branch delay slots', '(no) stack windows', 'good i-cache efficiency through the use of two-address code and memory operands'.
Every single one of those is a property of the ISA - the instruction set, its semantics and encoding - not the implementation.
Which do you think isn't part of the ISA?
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> Apple's A10 is shockingly close to matching Kaby Lake on performance within a similar power envelope. Do you have a source for this claim? Not saying it's wrong, I'd just appreciate seeing a real benchmark/power usage test.
Nobody has gone to the trouble of getting this done properly in public, but the closest comparison is here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review...
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Intel also makes arm processors (a cortex a5 i think?); perhaps they do license it.
Licenses can be revoked, patents cannot other than by analysis and finding them invalid.
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…
> Apple's A10 is shockingly close to matching Kaby Lake on performance within a similar power envelope. Do you have a source for this claim? Not saying it's wrong, I'd just appreciate seeing a real benchmark/power usage test.
From https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/the_2017_ipad_pros
"the new iPad Pro holds its own against the MacBook Pro in single-core performance — around 3,900 on the Geekbench 4 benchmark for the iPad Pro vs. around 4,200–4,400 for the various configurations of 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros.1 Multi-core performance has effectively doubled from the first generation of iPad Pro. That sort of year-over-year increase just doesn’t happen anymore, but here we are. The new iPad Pro gets a multi-core Geekbench 4 score of around 9200; the brand-new Core M3-based MacBook gets a multi-core score of around 6800."
The battery in the 12.9" iPad Pro is 38.8 Wh, while the 12" MacBook is 39.71 Wh, so about the same. Apple quotes about 10 hours battery life when doing lighter tasks like web browsing.
So it must be pretty close if not surpassing it now. Depends how much credibility you put on Geekbench.
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If GlobalFoundries didn't make these chips, Intel could pick up the slack... (Not to mention it is a consortium and not part of Samsung.)
Intel doesnt let anyone else use their fabs.