Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This 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.

View on HN

That'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.

Intel 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.

Intel has patented x86 for a long time now though. VME, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, and even long NOPs were all patented for example (now all expired).

It's kind of difficult to believe this when the relevant architecture of today (x64) was developed by AMD. X86 is ancient, any patents that can't be avoided would have expired years ago.

I'm always surprised when I read this. How long do patents last? I'd always thought they were indefinite or like copyright.

No. Patents are generally valid for 20 years from the initial filing. The idea is that you get a limited term monopoly in exchange for making the details of an invention public.

AMD included a number of Intel ISA components like SSE2 in AMD64, which was ok for them because AMD has a patent cross-license with Intel, but means it's still a patent minefield to implement it.

> All on non-Intel foundry processes. That was unimaginable 10 years ago.

Not really. 15 years ago, AMD was outperforming Intel at a lower price.

That was not because of foundry process, but because of better architecture. Intel was leading or tied at process width and clock speed the whole time.

Intel isn't losing on foundry process now either.

17 years ago AMD was leading due to foundry - they were the first x86 with copper interconnects.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1141534

Somewhat hilariously Intel released "Coppermine" series of CPUs in 1999, but those used Alu interconnects :D and were famously unstable above 1GHz.

AMD was also first to 1GHz. http://www.anandtech.com/show/498/4

Intel was even trying to dispute that fact, but its hard to convince PC hardware journalists you are first when they are already testing 1GHz Athlons on their own desks while reading Intel press release about closed door demonstration.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/1-ghz-intel-claims-it-was-first...

AMD always ran hotter. They were always about the same in technolgy level, just marketed differently because of design choices. Horses for courses.

> Apple's A10 is shockingly close to matching Kaby Lake on performance within a similar power envelope.

Do you have a source for this claim? Not saying it's wrong, I'd just appreciate seeing a real benchmark/power usage test.

Nobody has gone to the trouble of getting this done properly in public, but the closest comparison is here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review...

For the new A10x:

From https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/the_2017_ipad_pros

"the new iPad Pro holds its own against the MacBook Pro in single-core performance — around 3,900 on the Geekbench 4 benchmark for the iPad Pro vs. around 4,200–4,400 for the various configurations of 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros.1 Multi-core performance has effectively doubled from the first generation of iPad Pro. That sort of year-over-year increase just doesn’t happen anymore, but here we are. The new iPad Pro gets a multi-core Geekbench 4 score of around 9200; the brand-new Core M3-based MacBook gets a multi-core score of around 6800."

The battery in the 12.9" iPad Pro is 38.8 Wh, while the 12" MacBook is 39.71 Wh, so about the same. Apple quotes about 10 hours battery life when doing lighter tasks like web browsing.

So it must be pretty close if not surpassing it now. Depends how much credibility you put on Geekbench.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com