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Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

The AMD64/x86_64 ISA patents expire 2023. This makes RISC-V kind of pointless since x86 has a vastly superior ecosystem. I would prefer a solid x86 system without IME, Pluton, secret microcode, EFI cripple bootloader and all the other surveillance, anti-freedom crap over RISC-V any day.

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The 32-bit x86 patents expired awhile ago, and no one has done anything with it (far as I can tell). It's just really hard to implement an x86 CPU, and there probably isn't much motivation when they're so ubiquitous and cheap already.

AIUI, there's quite a few new x86 systems targeted at industrial/embedded use and retrocomputing. I've also heard of at least one modern core which implements i586.

Via technically still exists & makes x86 CPUs, mostly as part of China's efforts to get off of foreign technology dependencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin

There are reason why one would want to implement a RISC CPU over x86-64. Atleast as a small team. Another problem is that many application today assume the presence of atleast SSE if not AVX2 which have been around for longer then or almost a decade. A patent expired CPU will always have to play unless the architecture they clone was stopped being developed much (as SuperH was which J-Core based it's design on).

AMD64 contains everything up to SSE2. AVX2 only exists since 2015. I doubt many applications require it.

I think most of today's software runs on any AMD64 CPU. That said, this is changing. GCC and LLVM developers have introduced aliases "x86_64-v2" through "x86_64-v4", with the non-existent "v1" being the base spec as defined by the Athlon 64/Opteron.

v2 adds for example SSE4.2 and SSSE3, present since Intel Nehalem (first-generation Core i7 etc). I think other families support v2 since Intel Silvermont (Atom), AMD Bulldozer (FX), and AMD Jaguar (AMD E-series). I think one of the bigger losses would be AMD Phenom/Phenom II.

I think Red Hat wants to require x86_64-v2 starting with RHEL9. Arch Linux seems to also have considered it, but seemingly has since decided to support both v1 and v3, to provide both a bigger speed boost and better compatibility with old PC's.

I too remember when AMD and Intel simply gave up on filing any new patents in the early 2000s

Do you run many programs that need anything newer than SSE2? I can name one, I think.

x86_64 is much harder to implement though.

The superiority of the ecosystem is debatable. I guess you mostly have proprietary software in mind? (including Microsoft Windows). That will improve with time.

Are there plans by any vendor to develop/implement/sell any reasonably powerful x86 processor without IME/PSP?

It depends what you mean by "reasonably powerful" --- there are a handful of small Chinese companies with x86-cored SoCs, and of course this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25589081

Do you have a source for that? The initial announcement was in 1999. Did they file for the patents later?

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