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So ISAs are patentable? Even if you reimplement them from scratch, it's covered? Can anyone ELI5 that in the light of the Oracle vs Google "APIs are not copyrig
by tgb 6y ago
So ISAs are patentable? Even if you reimplement them from scratch, it's covered? Can anyone ELI5 that in the light of the Oracle vs Google "APIs are not copyrightable" battle? Seems like an ISA (sans implementation) is comparable to an API, so is the difference patents versus copyright? Are APIs patentable?
- a1369209993 6y agoI haven't investigated it in detail personally, but my understanding is that Intel has or had troll patents on the obvious (and therefore not legitimately patentable) way to go about implementing various x86 features. So if you reimplement it from scratch, the way you naturally go about implementing it will just happen to match 'Intel's' supposed 'inventions' which they have patents on. (Eg, I think they had a patent on register renaming at one point.)
- Someone 6y agoI think neither the basic idea of register renaming nor solutions to do it in a way that speeds up the processor (conceptually, each register reference has to go through a logical register-physical register lookup) are so obvious that they are guaranteed to be unworthy of patenting. If Intel had a patent on this, it must have been on some (possibly tiny) variation, though, as IBM had register renaming in hardware in 1967 (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasulo_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasulo_algorithm) and the POWER1 had it in 1990.