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Oh, does the patent also prevents software emulation? At any rate, what even counts as emulation? :D that legal stuff is way above my paygrade...

Lets say someone invents and patents doing arithmetic on numbers stored on a stack. They could keep anyone else from doing stack based math until the patent expires. It doesn't matter how you implement it - a work-alike chip, translation to different instruction encoding, a software simulation, analog simulation of the transistor circuit, guru moving beads on a board - anything operating on numbers on a stack is a violation.

Fortunately, stacks were invented many decades ago. The patents at issue are for many generation newer ideas. Luckily for the broader industry, these ideas are mostly hacks to paste better performance math onto the x86 instruction set.

One of the linked articles shows that Intel has patents on the "extended arithmetic" instructions. This is basically just an "add with carry" instruction that uses the oVerflow flag as an alternate Carry flag. There's nothing new about add with carry. However, repurposing a different flag, no matter how minor a concept, might be patentable - even though this was just Intel fixing their own instruction set design ****-up.

In the end, I think it depends on the exact wording of the patent. I would be surprised if it forbid other parties to do symbolic manipulation/transformation on x86 bytecide. Because then almost every compiler and disassembler would be illegal...

Compiling into x86 bytecode is fine because then you'll just be using Intel's (or a licensee's) product. Disassembly is fine because you won't be using the patent - but beware, the mnemonics are copyrighted.
 
TLDR. I don't know how far Apple have really advanced with it but if it was good enough to be in a MacBook. It would be.
Count on it.

"no matter if you believe that benchmarks across architectures are comparable or not", WHHAATTT??? If comparing power, you need to do an Apples to Apples comparison. Otherwise it's loses meaning.
Yes, once Apple has a software solution, ARM will definitely be in MacBooks.

It’s just comically funny how much more performance is in the A12x at comparable power usage levels. For example GFXBench runs 6x faster in the iPad Pro compared to the 12 inch MacBook.

https://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?be...0019&os2=OS X&api2=metal&hwtype2=GPU&hwname2=


And it is on par with the current highest graphics option in the 2018 15” MacBook Pro (upcoming Vega option should beat it though)

https://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?be...etal&hwtype2=dGPU&hwname2=AMD+Radeon+Pro+560X
 
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Yes, once Apple has a software solution, ARM will definitely be in MacBooks.

It’s just comically funny how much more performance is in the A12x at comparable power usage levels. For example GFXBench runs 6x faster in the iPad Pro compared to the 12 inch MacBook.

https://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&did1=69121342&os1=iOS&api1=metal&hwtype1=GPU&hwname1=Apple+Inc.+Apple+A12X+GPU&did2=33010019&os2=OS X&api2=metal&hwtype2=GPU&hwname2=


And it is on par with the current highest graphics option in the 2018 15” MacBook Pro (upcoming Vega option should beat it though)

https://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&did1=69121342&os1=iOS&api1=metal&hwtype1=GPU&hwname1=Apple+Inc.+Apple+A12X+GPU&did2=64998974&os2=OS X&api2=metal&hwtype2=dGPU&hwname2=AMD+Radeon+Pro+560X
Still think there is more to this story. Let’s say it uses 1/6th of the power. Why not just use 6 of them, surely at the level of performance Apple is claiming it would easily account for the overheard you get from emulating or virtualising?
 
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