I'm honestly somewhat surprised in all these discussions that one word hasn't come up a lot more frequently, more so as the years go by: patents. Patents under

I'm honestly somewhat surprised in all these discussions that one word hasn't come up a lot more frequently, more so as the years go by: patents. Patents under the current regime last 20 years. AMD64 was a 1999 announcement and spec was out in 2000 IIRC, 1st implementation (Opteron?) was like 2003, Conroe was 2006. And chip designs are done years before mass fabbing too. All of which means that, starting this year and definitely in the next few years all possible patents on the core x86-64 standard will expire, with each additional year bringing a few extra extensions. As far as what Apple requires to run historic macOS code, they clearly have not built a dependence on every cutting edge new instruction. They officially supported 2010 Mac Pros (which were on the Westmere chips) until last year, and 10.15 can still be made to run on them. Ever since Apple giving up on Intel chips has been discussed one general assumption/objection that I have always seen essentially assumed is that it also means abandoning x86 too, and in turn an enormous amount of macOS software, compatibility, etc. But need that actually be the case? x86-64 going patent free for all the essential parts opens up a lot of options for a lot of players. Maybe I've missed a lot of discussion (and if so I'd love to be directed to it) but so far I really haven't seen it considered much. 20 years is a long time in tech, but it's not forever. Without IP holding them back, need Apple ever give it up? They can focus on ARM, but a high performance hardware/software translation layer would certainly change the math around a transition wouldn't it?