33 ms·
Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield
- orionblastar 9y agoI remember IBM having a contract with Intel to allow other chip companies to make x86 chips in case Intel could not keep up with demand. QEMU emulates X86 chips as does other emulators. I wonder how those are effected?
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoAFAIK white box emulation has been around forever. I'd be surprised if it isn't already worked out in the courts, since this has been happening since before computers were around.
- poizan42 9y agoI don't think Intel wants to waste resources (and get bad PR) if it isn't a significant threat to their bottom line. Microsoft saying they are going to emulate x86 on ARM with low overhead (and thus making it possible to switch to ARM and still use tons of legacy software) is a much bigger danger to them.
- tyingq 9y agoIsn't there some notion that you have to actively defend a patent to enforce it? That is, something where selective enforcement puts you in a weaker legal position? Edit: The legal term appears to be "the doctrine of latches"
- CalChris 9y agodoctrine of laches [1] However, the Supreme Court has recently (March) said that laches is no defense to patent infringement. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) [2] http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/03/22/supreme-court-says-laches-no-defense-patent-infringement/id=79750/ http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/03/22/supreme-court-says-lach...
- nerpderp83 9y agoWell, since x86 is a monopoly ... Intel oughta go easy on this one.
- killin_dan 9y agoI was thinking the same thing. Intel is gonna get its shit pushed in one way or the other on this, and I'm gonna watch it happen with a big smile on my face. Patents will not stop the march of progress.
- wyldfire 9y agoIntel would argue (semi-sanely) that there's no monopoly on CPUs. You can make your own mips, arm, it even Risc-V CPUs. Also that they cross license x86 with competitors.
- pgeorgi 9y agoWere there any new licensees in the last 15 years? Nvidia reportedly had issues getting the necessary paperwork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver#History
- amiga-workbench 9y agoHow very convenient, Denver would have pooped all over Intel's Atom offerings at the time.
- blazespin 9y agoReally? How many people do you know that own a Smartphone that runs Intel?
- CamperBob2 9y agoThe whole idea behind patents is that they are legal monopolies backed up with guns.
- indolering 9y ago
- make3 9y agoHow did I not already know Microsoft had a working x86 emulator.. this is a massive game changer for the laptop space if it's fast and reliable enough, as afaik ARM chips are so much more power efficient for similar perf
- cmurf 9y agoPretty sure it was this acquisition. https://news.microsoft.com/2003/02/19/microsoft-acquires-connectix-virtual-machine-technology/ https://news.microsoft.com/2003/02/19/microsoft-acquires-con...
- my123 9y agoIt's actually unrelated with Connectix. Connectix is much older, and was killed a long time ago. Virtual PC for Macs was a full-blown JIT though.
- mistercow 9y agoEvery time I read anything about Connectix, I become more convinced that they were run by some combination of time travelers and genetically modified super-hackers.
- mrpippy 9y agoMODE32. Virtual PC. Virtual Game Station (PS1 emulator). RAM Doubler. Speed Doubler. QuickCam. One hell of a run.
- zeta0134 9y agoThere are several existing and excellent x86 emulators floating around. In the open source space, QEMU is quite fantastic and well supported. I'm not surprised at all that Microsoft managed to either develop one in house, or acquire one. x86 is an old and very well understood architecture at this point. The difficulty thus isn't in writing a working emulator, it's in figuring out which features you can support from a business perspective without treading on still active patents. Microsoft is one of the few companies that can probably absorb a patent fight here and come out on top, and if they succeed, it will counter-intuitively threaten the continued dominance of x86. Once they can release an ARM-based version of Windows that sports backwards compatibility (the primary missing feature that caused Windows RT to fail spectacularly) more mobile machines will be free to use ARM chips, and software developers will have incentives to natively support ARM targets for power efficiency reasons. Since Intel banks on x86 continuing to be the dominant architecture in the desktop and laptop space, they must feel threatened by this move, so the suit doesn't surprise me. They'll now be fighting an uphill battle. On the one hand, Intel processors are still pretty much king in raw performance, but on the other hand, very few consumers actually need the kind of performance that you can only get on Intel chips anymore. A decent web browser runs on just about anything, so an architecture shift in the consumer space is quite plausible. Some could argue that it's already happened with tablets.
- natch 9y agoPatents 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 happen anytime soon.
- aidenn0 9y agoTFA specifically mentions SSE, AVX, TSX, and SGX. All of those have had new features added in the last year or two.
- blazespin 9y agoThe point is interesting though Microsoft might be working carefully only to emulate older technology. It's not like they really have to support x86 as well as they support it on the x86 version of the OS. In fact they can get to market faster by not providing deep emulation.
- sitkack 9y agoIntel implements a thing, say SSE and AVX which were pioneered by Cray 20+ years earlier. So arguably, they took out of patent protection technology and applied it to X86. This is exactly how the patent system was designed to work. I would argue that what they don't get is a defacto monopoly on the use of vector instructions for X86. Even that specific encoding. Because it is now an issue of compatibility and interoperability. The history of closing an instruction set from the patenting of a self few instructions is atrocious. Millions of entities have expressed solutions to their problems in X86, having to pay a tax to Intel in-perpetuity because of that is bullshit.
- qb45 9y agoOf these I think only SSE is really important. AVX is relatively new (2011) and most software likely can handle CPUs/emulators which lack it. TSX and SGX are Intel-only so any software that can run on AMD doesn't need them.
- ikeboy 9y ago> And Intel's business health continues to have a strong dependence on Microsoft's business, which has to make the chip firm a little wary of taking the software company (or its customers) to court. I mean, Apple and Samsung had a billion dollar lawsuit while Samsung chips were still in iPhones. It's certainly precedented to sue a corporation you're actively doing business with.
- posterboy 9y agoThey had contracts so Samsung was bound and Apple did start using their own chips, so it's not at all certain that the law suit didn't further disturb the business relation.
- throwaway91111 9y agoI believe their chips continue to use samsung fabs today.
- AstralStorm 9y agoIf GlobalFoundries didn't make these chips, Intel could pick up the slack... (Not to mention it is a consortium and not part of Samsung.)
- kasabali 9y agoIntel doesnt let anyone else use their fabs.
- rasz 9y agosure they do, Intel manufactured FPGAs for a long time before buying altera
- kasabali 9y agoI don't think FPGA's count in this context but I did a quick search on Intel fabs and it looks like I'm wrong anyway: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/intel-will-allow-arm-chipmakers-to-use-its-10nm-manufacturing-process/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/intel-will-allow-arm...
- AstralStorm 9y agoSo they will ban all virtual machines which sometimes have to go for emulation, e.g. to handle XSAVE? Scorched earth policy will likely not be defensible under fair use law. Reverse engineering for compatibility has a few precedents.
- yuhong 9y agoWe are talking about patents.
- pgeorgi 9y agoPatents may be selectively enforced, there's no forfeiture as there is with trademarks. Intel had (and has) no issue with qemu or bochs emulating everything, as long as they were niche and/or promoting the Intel platform (and grudgingly accepting compatibles). However a move to rid Microsoft's platform from Intel altogether without compromising compatibility is something worth fighting for. I heard that ARM is rather similar in that aspect: emulators for development are a-ok, but trying to run ARM emulation on a consumer product with no ARM components inside will drive up the legal fees until some licensing agreement is set up.
- my123 9y agoIntel uses that for their x86 Android devices - and as far as I know, ARM did not sue.
- throwaway91111 9y agoIntel also makes arm processors (a cortex a5 i think?); perhaps they do license it.
- AstralStorm 9y agoLicenses can be revoked, patents cannot other than by analysis and finding them invalid.
- 9y ago
- amalcon 9y agoYears 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 are two approaches the plaintiff might take here. The simplest is to cite the doctrine of equivalents[1]. This is basically the notion that if you do the same thing in the same way for the same purpose, then it's the same process, even though you are using digital instructions instead of logic gates. The legal theory here is pretty well settled. The problem is that you'd need to justify that digital instructions are obviously equivalent to logic gates, and a skilled professional would have equated them at the time of the patent's filing. The other approach is to argue that an emulator actually is a processor, and therefore fits the literal claims of the patent. The explanation for this is pretty well-established: it's literally the Church-Turing Thesis[2]. However, the viability of this argument depends on the language of the patent claims. Also, it's hard enough to explain the C-T Thesis to CS students. My undergrad had an entire 1-credit-equivalent course that basically just covered this and the decidability problem. Explaining it to a judge, who (while likely highly intelligent) probably has no CS background, over the course of litigation is likely to be really hard. Now, Intel certainly has enough resources to do both of these things (and they may also have precedent to cite, that didn't exist back then or that wasn't relevant to that case). Don't take this as an opinion on any possible result, it's just information such as I remember it. [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_equivalents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_equivalents [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
- yuhong 9y agoOne patent is https://patents.google.com/patent/US6721866B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US6721866B2 which is for LDDQU and probably would not matter for an emulator. I wonder about https://patents.google.com/patent/US7155601B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7155601B2/en which is a patent on PSHUFLW/PSHUFHW. I wonder if a CPU instruction in which the only difference is that it operates on different registers is patentable.
- tyingq 9y agoAn earlier discussion here had most people guessing it was Apple, not Microsoft, that Intel was lobbing the threat at. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518189
- Analemma_ 9y agoI apologize; I did a brief search before submitting but did not see that one.
- Deinos 9y agoThe article mentions Cyrix as a "victim" of Intel patent defense; however, Cyrix not only won their lawsuits, but they also went after Intel for patent violations in the Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/846/522/1687321/ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/84...
- std_throwaway 9y agoYou can win a lawsuit and still lose so much time and money on the way that you are worse off afterwards. Vice versa you can cause your opponents so much trouble with lawsuits that - even though you don't win them - you are better off than them afterwards.
- rhaps0dy 9y agoBut Microsoft is bigger than Intel. So if anything, they will cause trouble to Intel.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's not just about direct litigation costs. If they could e.g. block a major product release, the damage becomes much greater.
- std_throwaway 9y agoBoth can afford to spend hundreds of millions on a lawsuit. The lawsuit will be only a part of the budget for both and non-existential. So I don't think that the size matters here. It would be different if the lawsuit is so expensive that one party could go bankrupt due to it. This isn't about right and wrong. It's about money. Who has to pay how much to the other party? Both parties think they are better off if they fight. Both parties think they could win money in the end. It's a gamble in the courtroom.
- chongli 9y ago
- amorphid 9y agoAttorneys 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.
- blazespin 9y agoTo 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 Intel to invest more resources ( even at a loss) into competing with ARM.
- throwaway2048 9y agoI don't see why Intel would ever do that, for any amount of money that Microsoft would conceivably pay.
- blazespin 9y agoWell there are so many boundary conditions here . As noted below it's possible that Microsoft could emulate only older technology that isn't covered by patent. Or emulate x86 technology which has weak patent protection and then use some of their own patents to sue Intel into agreeing to license. There are so many strategies and tactics and Battle maneuvers here that it's difficult to say in just one simple hacker news posting what's going to happen.
- emmab 9y ago> I'm not sure just copying someone's technology and emulating it without paying a license fee is all that great either. And yet vendor-lockin is not good for competition. Is the increased incentive for research investment due to patents worth more to humanity than the resulting vendor-lockin that makes it harder to switch to AMD?
- faragon 9y agoIntel will not threat Microsoft, not even indirectly, in my opinion. Rationale: once Apple starts shipping desktops and laptops with ARM chips, the only safe port for the expensive x86 chips would be Microsoft (desktop and server market) and big iron on Linux/Unix/Hypervisors.
- mtgx 9y agoSo Intel is so scared of little ol' ARM (compare their revenues) that it's willing to use patents to take it out of the PC market, rather than compete on technical grounds? Okay, got it. I'll make sure to account for that in my next CPU/device purchase.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoIntel vs ARM revenue is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since the former makes chips and the latter only licenses designs.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoI was just watning about fhis on anothet thread. It's not competition if it requires compatibility with patdnt-protected ISA or microarchitectures. It's coercion.
- mental_ 9y agoIf AMD can implement x86 in hardware, why can't Microsoft implement it in software?
- boulos 9y agoAMD has a (non-transferable!) license to do so.
- std_throwaway 9y agoI wonder if this kept AMD alive during the hard times. x86 isn't going away for the next 10 years or longer.
- indolering 9y agoYup, Intel literally needs a competitor to keep out of hot-water with regards to anti-trust laws.
- dom0 9y agoAMD and Intel have agreements (mainly due to x64).
- bryanlarsen 9y agoIntel & AMD have a patent cross-licensing agreement. The x86-64 instruction set was designed and first implemented by AMD.
- rayiner 9y agoThis 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 law has run its course, Intel's lead on that front has been shrinking. Apple's A10 is shockingly close to matching Kaby Lake on performance within a similar power envelope. And Ryzen is within spitting distance of Broadwell at the high end. All on non-Intel foundry processes. That was unimaginable 10 years ago.
- _delirium 9y agoThat'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 tolerated in order to meet 2nd-source requirements. But even AMD they tried to strongarm out of the market later, leading to litigation where AMD eventually won a bunch of continued patent licenses only as part of the lawsuit settlement. Intel has also used patent lawsuits over the past 30 years to attempt to limit competition from Cyrix, Via, NVidia, and Transmeta, among others. Though they did lose or unfavorably settle a number of those lawsuits.
- rayiner 9y agoIntel has engaged in some strategic patent litigation over the years, but if you look at the chart in the article, it looks like there has been a big push to get more ISA patents in the last several years.
- yuhong 9y agoIntel has patented x86 for a long time now though. VME, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, and even long NOPs were all patented for example (now all expired).
- wfunction 9y agoCan 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 introduced in 2001, right? So isn't it just 1 year until Microsoft can put in what's required for the AMD64 architecture?
- mrpippy 9y agoWorth noting that Microsoft's emulator is only emulating x86, not AMD64 (at least not yet)
- wfunction 9y agoI definitely didn't know. Are you sure about this/do you have a link?
- mrpippy 9y agoYeah, it's been mentioned in all the posts. I assume it was enough work just to get x86 working, and there's almost no 64-bit-only Windows software (certainly nothing you would want to run emulated). "only 32-bit x86 support is being offered" http://www.anandtech.com/show/10889/microsoft-and-qualcomm-bring-windows-10-to-snapdragon-processors http://www.anandtech.com/show/10889/microsoft-and-qualcomm-b...
- wfunction 9y agoWow, you're right, I totally missed that. Thanks!!
- zekevermillion 9y agoI'll just sit hear eating my popcorn and waiting for a lowRISC computer I can buy.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoCan'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/# https://www.sifive.com/#
- zekevermillion 9y agoNext decade?! That long???
- ZenoArrow 9y agoYes. 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.
- zekevermillion 9y agobut, lowRISC says they are going to crowdfund a SOC this year... let's say it takes them 2 years to have one I can buy, I should be able to have a RISC V based computer that can run linux within 5 years! Am I dreaming?
- ZenoArrow 9y agolowRISC are currently on v0.4 of their design, and we're already half way through the year. I'd be very surprised if they decided to commit to building an ASIC before they reached v1.0. http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2017/06/lowrisc-0-4-milestone-release/ http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2017/06/lowrisc-0-4-milestone-re... By the way, I'm not trying to stop you dreaming, I'm hinting the fact that if you want to speed things along you should get involved in the embedded space. If you're waiting as a passive consumer you'll more than likely get disappointed, but if you're actively contributing to the platform you may find the wait more bearable as you're helping to speed it along.
- dboreham 9y agoLogically 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 to understand their ISA? (no, surely). Now, can I incorporate that translator into my OS such that it can now execute i386 binaries by translating them to my new instruction set which I can execute either directly or by emulation? If so then I am now not infringing. Or did infringement suddenly manifest because I combined two non-infringing things (translator + emulator for my own translated ISA)?
- comex 9y agoIf 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_property_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_intellectual_pro... If you execute it in an emulator, though, all bets are off...
- mrpippy 9y agoHere'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)
- tachyonbeam 9y agoNo more than wearing an Intel t-shirt would give you rights to all their patents.
- dboreham 9y agoBut I'm not executing it on an i386 emulator.
- pmarreck 9y agoI would personally be pleased if the millstone of the x86 instruction set sank both Intel AND microsoft's hegemony.
- julian_1 9y agoAnyone know if it is an emulator, or an on-demand isa translator that operates at runtime? I wonder what the implications are for infringement.
- someSven 9y agoMay someone please elaborate on the difference between what MS does and emulators on Linux like Quemu and ExaGear?
- clouddrover 9y agoHere's a Microsoft Channel 9 video in which they talk about the x86 emulation layer: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171
- chucklenorris 9y agoI quickly watched this and they seem to be running a jit with disk caching. Also they had League of Legends on the desktop so i'm guessing they support sse instructions.
- comex 9y agoThe difference, as it pertains to the patent issue, is nothing technical - it's simply that Intel feels threatened by Microsoft's emulator and not by qemu. (Though if Intel has ever redistributed qemu, there may be an additional GPL wrinkle...)
- rwmj 9y agoIntel contributes to qemu (or at least, developers with @intel.com email addresses contribute). However AFAIK they don't contribute to the emulation code (TCG).
- criddell 9y agoMarket size. Intel can choose to sue or not sue. There's no obligation to chase after every infringement, so the ones they do chase are picked by bean counters.
- clouddrover 9y agoFor anyone interested, here's a Microsoft Channel 9 video in which they talk about some of the x86 emulation layer internals: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171
- syshum 9y agoMicrosoft should Partner with AMD to pressure the big desktop and laptop OEM's to stop using Intel CPU;s I would love to see Dell, Lenovo and HP to switch exclusivly to Ryzen processors, And switch to the new Naples CPU in all their Server/Storage systems
- asveikau 9y agoAnother reason Microsoft should be telling ISVs to recompile for Win32 on ARM instead of binary emulation.
- jonstokes 9y agoAlright, 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 in the billion+ transistor SoC regime. (I will include some relevant links to ancient articles of mine about magical ARM performance elves later.) ARM processors are more power efficient because they do less work per unit time. Once they're as performant as x86, they'll be operating in roughly the same power envelope. (Spare the Geekbench scores... I can't even. I have ancient published rants about that, too). Anyway, given that all of this is the case, it is preposterous to imagine that an ARM processor that's running emulated(!!!) x86 code will be at anything but a serious performance/watt disadvantage over a comparable x86 part. This brings me to another point: Transmeta didn't die because of patents. Transmeta died because "let's run x86 in emulation" is not a long-term business plan, for anybody. It sucks. I have ancient published rants on this topic, too, but the nutshell is that when you run code in emulation, you have to take up a bunch of cache space and bus bandwidth with the translated code, and those two things are extremely important for performance. You just can't be translating code and then stashing it in valuable close-to-the-decoder memory and/or shuffling it around the memory hierarchy without taking a major hit. So to recap, x86 emulation on ARM is not a threat to Intel's performance/watt proposition -- not even a little teensy bit in any universe where the present laws of physics apply. To think otherwise is to believe untrue and magical things about ISAs. HOWEVER, x86-on-ARM via emulation could still be a threat to Intel in a world where, despite its disadvantages, it's still Good Enough to be worth doing for systems integrators who would love to stop propping up Intel's fat fat fat margins and jump over to the much cheaper (i.e. non-monopoly) ARM world. Microsoft, Apple, and pretty much anybody who's sick of paying Intel's markup on CPUs (by which I mean, they'd rather charge the same price and pocket that money themselves) would like to be able to say sayonara to x86. The ARM smart device world looks mighty good, because there are a bunch of places where you can buy ARM parts, and prices (and ARM vendor margins) are low. It's paradise compared to x86 land, from a unit cost perspective. Finally, I'll end on a political note. It has been an eternity since there was a real anti-trust action taken against a major industry. Look at the amount of consolidation across various industries that has gone totally uncontested in the past 20 years. In our present political environment, an anti-trust action over x86 lock-in just isn't a realistic possibility, no matter how egregious the situation gets. So Intel is very much in a position to fight as dirty as they need to in order to prevent systems integrators from moving to ARM and using emulation as a bridge. I read this blog post of theirs in that light -- they're putting everyone on notice that the old days of antitrust fears are long gone (for airlines, pharma, telecom... everybody, really), so they're going to move to protect their business accordingly. Edit: forgot the links. In previous comments on exactly this issue I've included multiple, but here's a good one and I'll leave it at that: https://arstechnica.com/business/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-riscification-of-x86/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-r...
- kev009 9y agoIBM sold an x86 translation for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVM_Lx86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVM_Lx86. Would be interesting to know why it was discontinued.
- mrpippy 9y agoThat 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.
- ksec 9y agoEverything Intel have said and put forth are Hardware companies. I can't believe anyone can be sued for software emulation of x86. And unless Qualcomm and Microsoft are working on a Hardware assisteed X86 emulation, this warning shot may be directed at somebody else. My guess: Apple.
- dis-sys 9y agobest outcome I can think of: AMD licenses x86 patents to Qualcomm/MS to make x86 emulator better patent troll proof. In return, Qualcomm and AMD team up for better ARM server based processors. MS can sell more Windows/Windows Sever (sad).
- cwyers 9y agoIt's a non-transferable license.
- chris_wot 9y agoWindows 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.
- SBArbeit 9y agoThey have a HAL for ARM, this is to allow x86 programs to run on top of that HAL. That's what Intel is attacking.
- narrator 9y agoAnother component of Microsoft getting off Intel is that the antitrust settlement only applied to x86 hardware, so MS getting off x86 would let them lock down the platform and do all their dirty tricks all over again.
- sliken 9y agoKeep 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.
- netheril96 9y agoThat 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.
- cesarb 9y ago> 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.
- int_19h 9y agoMost Windows apps don't deal directly with things line LONG_PTR and window procs - they just use a framework, and frameworks have been updated to do this all correctly a long time ago (this migration started in early 00s, when Windows on IA-64 appeared). The main reason these days is that there's simply no strong incentive to go 64-bit for most desktop software. The 2Gb memory limit is a non-issue for most scenarios, and other than that, why bother? If you compile and test for 32-bit, it works for anyone who is still on 32-bit Windows and it works for 64-bit. And recompiling for 64-bit is usually easy, but it doubles your test matrix - so "here's a build, but there's no official support" is not an unpopular approach.
- based2 9y agohttps://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/06/07/platinum-continues-to-evolve-find-ways-to-maintain-invisibility/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/06/07/platinum... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515381
- payne92 9y agoIt 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.