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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

You can copyright code / implementation but you can't copyright the behaviour of an individual instruction!

It's very unlikely but there could conceivably be a patent, but it would have long since expired.

No case to answer.

Edit: Just to clarify - referring to treatment of one instruction here. As peer comment has said Rosetta translates ISA rather than implements so it's even further removed from being a copyright issue.

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> It's very unlikely but there could conceivably be a patent, but it would have long since expired.

For those who weren't following the 32-bit to 64-bit transition on the x86 world back then, the x86-64 ISA is from the year 2000 (https://web.archive.org/web/20000817014037/http://www.x86-64...), so any patent which applies to that ISA (without the ISA being prior art for the patent) is now over 20 years old.

Thanks. I guess I was thinking that any patents on the instruction in the original article and of FP behaviour would predate 64-bit, but you're right that there could be relevant patents on x86-64.

Thinking aloud, I wonder if AVX 512 is translated?

AVX instructions are not supported. See here: https://medium.com/macoclock/m1-rosetta-2-limitation-illegal...

Thanks! Presumably most retail x86-64 applications will have an execution path that avoids AVX?

Intel still sells x86_64 CPUs without AVX. See Jasper Lake and Comet Lake Celeron/Pentium.

The x86-64 extension was made by AMD, though, not by Intel. So if at all the license would have to be obtained from AMD...

Interestingly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 says this:

> x86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD. AMD holds patents on techniques used in AMD64; those patents must be licensed from AMD in order to implement AMD64

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