Apple moving away, AMD kick in, ARM taking dominance. I guess we are about to witness the fall (may be death) of another titan.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...
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.
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-architec...
Those patents (if any) would surely be held by its inventor, AMD, to which Apple has a healthy corporate relationship.
Intel still hold x86 license to make x86 chip. the worst outcome maybe Intel became fab less like AMD and just focus on design.
I could see an Intel bail out if things keep going south, but that’s about it.