3 ms·

Is it a patent violation to emulate x86?

• mark-r 9y ago
  Any patents for x86 itself have surely expired. Why do you think they emphasized their follow-on technologies? I wonder if SSE is still protected, but they've still got SSE2, SSE3, and whatever follows that (I haven't kept track). They're making a not-so-transparent threat that any attempt to emulate anything that still has patent protection is liable to be prosecuted. It's the old FUD technique, make it appear that there's some legal doubt about new technologies to slow the uptake.
  • nickpsecurity 9y ago
    "Any patents for x86 itself have surely expired. Why do you think they emphasized their follow-on technologies?" It's basically equivalent if there's no alternatives in microarchitectural details that achieve the same thing without violating a patent. There's a crazy amount of patents on that stuff. So, whoever builds it needs to sell enough to pay the lawyer fees on top of the catch up fees.
  • yuhong 9y ago
    Remember the priority dates of Pentium 4 SSE2 patents released in Nov 2000 are probably around 1999 at the latest for example. SSE1 itself is just a subset of SSE2 with only single precision floating point instructions BTW. That itself was released with Pentium III in Jan 1999, meaning the priority date can't be later than 1998.