231–234 of 234 posts
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Intel doesnt let anyone else use their fabs.
sure they do, Intel manufactured FPGAs for a long time before buying altera
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> All on non-Intel foundry processes. That was unimaginable 10 years ago. Not really. 15 years ago, AMD was outperforming Intel at a lower price.
That was not because of foundry process, but because of better architecture. Intel was leading or tied at process width and clock speed the whole time.
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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.
When it's for the matter of compatibility , are patent laws applicable?
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Almost everything that you described is microarchitectural, and not tied to the ISA.
> 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 is…
i-cache efficiency: Again implementation specific. Efficiency is entirely a result of implementation, isn't it ?
no branch delay slot: Yes, this is a part of the ISA. My point though was that it is uncommon enough that I wouldn't call it a great virtue of x86 per se.