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Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for extensive x86 emulation capability within macOS on Apple Silicon, so I guess the minefield isn't as dangerous as Intel implie
by sjwright 6y ago
Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for extensive x86 emulation capability within macOS on Apple Silicon, so I guess the minefield isn't as dangerous as Intel implies.
Or perhaps Apple is happily licensing patents? If so, that suggests that Rosetta 2 will be a limited-time feature just like Rosetta 1. Apple won't be interested in paying for patent licenses forever.
- mappu 6y agoPatents have a 20-year lifespan so the common x86_32 patents must have already expired. As for x86_64, the patents would expire in either 2020 or 2023 depending on if you count from the first published documentation or from the first shipping CPU (IANAL). Of course that is only the baseline ISA (and SSE2). The future extensions (SSE3+/FMA/AVX and AES-NI/RDRAND/...) would not yet be patent-free but most software is really just compiled against the baseline. Apple managed to split x86_64 into a sub-architecture x86_64h for post-Haswell, but broadly speaking, nobody else has: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro-architecture_update https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro-architec...
- sjwright 6y ago> As for x86_64, the patents would expire in either 2020 or 2023 Those patents (if any) would surely be held by its inventor, AMD, to which Apple has a healthy corporate relationship.