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Comment by leeter | Hacker News Reader

RE AVX and above: My guess is that they are licensing the Transmeta IP which doesn't include those licenses IIRC. So unless they wanted to get sued they'd have to be careful. I suspect some SSE instructions may also not be supported as I don't recall if Transmeta had a license up to SSE4.

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The original Rosetta was based on technology from a company called Transitive which was acquired by IBM a couple years after Apple's PowerPC to Intel transition. [1] It's not immediately obvious what technology licenses are involved with this new incarnation of Rosetta.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit

I doubt they're licencing Transmeta. Transmeta never had an x86_64 processor.

True, but they did have the license IIRC. Otherwise they'd be licensing from VIA or whomever owns that license now. That license AFAIK would include up to SSE4. It's not like Apple is going to tell us. But the JIT nature makes me think it's Transmeta as the company currently holding that IP is a "Patent enforcement entity".

Or they're just giving Intel the finger, banking on having a warchest of defensive patents from acquiring nearly every promising fabless CPU startup of the past 15 years.

Edit: Also, I don't think Transmeta's license would include SSE4. They were defunct at that point.

Possible, I kinda doubt they would as Intel could just cut them off at the knees as they threatened MS with for the Surface Pro X. There is the remote possibility they are licensing from Intel too. At the end of the day I doubt they are going to tell us. Once people start getting the dev machines they can find the edges of the implementation. I suspect it has some quirks we'll discover over time. Regardless this is speculation.

> I kinda doubt they would as Intel could just cut them off at the knees

And then Apple would cut Intel off at the knees in return. Microsoft doesn't really have any CPU design patents, Apple has thousands, so they'd be treated differently.

Transmeta died what, 20 years ago? All their patents have now expired.

Wikipedia says defunct in 2009, though the decline started earlier.

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