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Comment by valarauca1 | Hacker News Reader

The commetization of the CPU market was bound to happen eventually. As modern production techniques for chips and FPGA programming start to converge rapidly.

What is the ETA until we get a GNX "GNX is Not X86"? An Open source i386 core that people can run existing applications on? Much like GNU offered a standardized FOSS platform people could run existing Unix workloads on.

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There's ao486 already [1] [2]. I seem to recall that there are a few corners where it's not 100% complete/compatible, but it's complete enough to boot Windows 95 and Linux (assuming a Linux distro with 486 support, now an endangered species), and run some classic DOS games/demos. It doesn't run at a speed equivalent to a "real" 486, at least on a cheap FPGA.

[1] https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2QcW6r3MlDThUnC8cA-r...

I'm not sure what value there would be in a 368. You can emulate that on a modern CPU if you need legacy software support. Otherwise just use RISC-V, it already runs Linux and thousands of programs. Oh, and it's got a 64bit version too.

A great question .... all the 386 patents are out of date now right?

The wikipedia page says that AMD64 must be licensed from AMD. The market for a new 32-bit x86 clone would not be large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86

"...x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD."

That changes in a couple years though.

Yeah but a 386 and an x86-64 are quite different things ....

They are. We're pretty close to Pentium Pro in terms of patent expiration.

Do you know of any worthwhile patent as in general enough to be reused in a different chip but advanced enough to be a current blocker and not replaced by another technique or is it just to protect i686 proprietary elements ?

Knowing about patents like that opens you to triple damages for "willful infringement".

486 too, and possibly the Pentium (P5) the last time I checked.

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