4 ms·

Do you have any examples of the kind of patents you would need to license? I don't anything in the ISA itself is covered by patents anymore. And the basic tech

by audunw 6y ago

Do you have any examples of the kind of patents you would need to license? I don't anything in the ISA itself is covered by patents anymore. And the basic techniques for making a high performance CPU are getting quite old. Seems like a lot of the techniques used by desktop CPUs being released today have a a lot to do with advanced cache architectures, "AI" branch prediction, virtual memory, hypervisors, etc. A lot of these things will not be so relevant to a special purpose embedded CPU like this.

dogma1138 6y ago
Depends on what the embedded CPU is for, especially for more bespoke applications that may require optimization for specific tasks like encryption, networking and compression you’ll likely to hit a patent wall quite quickly. And in general building a high performance ALU, FPU, a modern MMU with virtualization and I/OMMU support, an efficient instruction decoder and register file are all covered by patents that are still in effect. Large companies that design their own cores cross license a shit tonne of patents between themselves and for everything else they hold each other at gun point. AMD and Intel quite likely violate each other’s patents all the time at least those that aren’t covered by the cross licensing agreement they just know that if they go to court neither of them will be able to put a CPU on the shelves for the next 3 decades. NVIDIA got patent slapped to oblivion when they wanted to emulate x86 on GPUs despite technically having an x86 license at the time (although Intel claimed it didn’t cover what NVIDIA was planning) and the fact that binary translation has been ruled not to infringe on ISA related patents. In general circumventing patents is expensive and if you don’t have a large enough patent portfolio to be able to plausibly claim how you’ve achieved a certain level of functionality you’ll always be at risk of claims and law suits. Until there will be a large consortium or industry leaders that are willing to share their patents for free or at an acceptable cost through a (F)RAND license with all members I don’t see RISC-V being a cheap version for anyone but the existing giants that already either license enough patents from others or have enough of their own to be bulletproof.
- my123 6y ago
  Note that even Microsoft got warned by this: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/ https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-sti... for Windows on Arm including x86 backwards compatibility. However, guess that Microsoft has a big enough patent portfolio for Intel to not go beyond that threat...
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Microsoft and Apple also not in direct competition with Intel, and Intel rather not lose more of their business in a pissing contest so I think it's treating them somewhat differently (tho if you don't protect your patents you kinda open yourself for future violations) NVIDIA on the other hand was and still is a direct threat to Intel in the datacenter.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      No, that's trademarks, you need to enforce them.

by audunw 6y ago

dogma1138 6y ago

Depends on what the embedded CPU is for, especially for more bespoke applications that may require optimization for specific tasks like encryption, networking and compression you’ll likely to hit a patent wall quite quickly. And in general building a high performance ALU, FPU, a modern MMU with virtualization and I/OMMU support, an efficient instruction decoder and register file are all covered by patents that are still in effect. Large companies that design their own cores cross license a shit tonne of patents between themselves and for everything else they hold each other at gun point. AMD and Intel quite likely violate each other’s patents all the time at least those that aren’t covered by the cross licensing agreement they just know that if they go to court neither of them will be able to put a CPU on the shelves for the next 3 decades. NVIDIA got patent slapped to oblivion when they wanted to emulate x86 on GPUs despite technically having an x86 license at the time (although Intel claimed it didn’t cover what NVIDIA was planning) and the fact that binary translation has been ruled not to infringe on ISA related patents. In general circumventing patents is expensive and if you don’t have a large enough patent portfolio to be able to plausibly claim how you’ve achieved a certain level of functionality you’ll always be at risk of claims and law suits. Until there will be a large consortium or industry leaders that are willing to share their patents for free or at an acceptable cost through a (F)RAND license with all members I don’t see RISC-V being a cheap version for anyone but the existing giants that already either license enough patents from others or have enough of their own to be bulletproof.

my123 6y ago
Note that even Microsoft got warned by this: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/ https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-sti... for Windows on Arm including x86 backwards compatibility. However, guess that Microsoft has a big enough patent portfolio for Intel to not go beyond that threat...
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Microsoft and Apple also not in direct competition with Intel, and Intel rather not lose more of their business in a pissing contest so I think it's treating them somewhat differently (tho if you don't protect your patents you kinda open yourself for future violations) NVIDIA on the other hand was and still is a direct threat to Intel in the datacenter.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    No, that's trademarks, you need to enforce them.