Intel Submits Patent Covering Itanium Instructions

chris.bitmead writes: "Rather than submit garden-variety claims to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Intel is trying to patent the functions carried out by specific instructions. In doing so, the company appears to be, in effect, trying to patent the IA-64 instruction set itself." Is this an attempt to block out even reasonable competition, or is this just "business as usual" as at least one voice in the story says?

Comments

Re:oh great.

[RedWizzard]

Unfortunately modular design is very difficult when it comes to supporting multiple CPU families. The problem is, of course, that you need to swap the north bridge (what Intel now call the MCH) when you swap the CPU type because the bus protocols will be different. There has been some speculation that you might be able to drop an Athlon into a Alpha motherboard (and vice versa), as they use the same CPU bus protocol, but I've never heard it being done.

One interesting design was that of the PIOS One, which put the north bridge and the CPU(s) on a daughterboard that plugged into a PCI bus. Unfortunately it never got passed the prototype stage but it would have made for an easy way of changing CPU families and even changing the number of processors (up to four).

been there done that

[harryseldon]

Intel is hardly the first to patent aspects of an instruction set. Nobody ever cloned the VAX, because essential aspects of the instruction set were patented. The IBM 370 arch was widely cloned because it was not protected. There are intel patents on the x86 arch and microarch, but (apparently) not sufficent to prevent cloning. MIPS has patents around a few instructions but one embedded CPU company (Lexra?) got around it by not implementing those load instructions. Aspects of the Alpha arch are patented IIRC. No alpha clones, sorry. In short - looking for 'good guys'? keep looking. No modern processor instruction sets are unprotected.

not speaking for my employer. whoever that may be.

Patent App

[pjrc]

Abstract

A computational system in which an operational code (opcode) consisting of a sequence of numerical data instructs an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) to perform an operation on two operands, storing the resulting arithematic or logical result into either of the operands.

What is claimed is:

1. A computational system comprising an ALU (Arithematic Logic Unit), c a operational code decoder, memory bus interface, and microcoded control logic, wherein,

Arithematic Logic Unit further comprises circuitry to perform mathematic operations of addition, subtraction, increment, decrement, multiply, divide, and logic functions of AND, OR, XOR, right and left bit shift;

2. Operational code decoder comprises circuitry that extracts encoded information to direct the activity of the Arithematic Logic Unit (claim 1);

3. Memory bus interface that transfers the operands required by the ALU (claim 1) and instruction opcodes needed by the decoder (claim 2);

4. Microcoded Control Logic which sequences the timing and produces control signals with the proper timing to direct the activities of the ALU (claim 1), Opcode Decoder (claim 2), and Memory Bus Interface (claim 3).

Description Of The Invention

The present invention related to the operation of a computational device, used to execute computational tasks, wherein the computational task to be performed by be programmed by creating a list of operational codes.

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maybe someone else wants to continue this... it's late and I'm getting tired...

What Intel is doing...

[trims]

After reading this article, and looking at one of the patent mentioned, I'm going to hazzard a reasonable guess at exactly what's going on here:

1. They aren't patenting IA-64 codes. That is, the aren't trying to patent JMP for jump, FOO1A for super-duper multimedia instruction, etc. I don't think they're fool enough to believe that anything like that could ever get patented, or for that matter, copyrighted or trademarked.
2. It is unclear if they are trying to protect functionality or implimentation. From the patent application itself, it appears as though they are only trying to protect their implimentation of how to do interrupt context returns, not the concept of interrupt context returns itself. The article, however, sounds like they're trying for the latter.

The problem with this kind of patenting is that the "concept" is closely tied to the "implimentation". That is, the concept may be so narrowly circumscribed that any implimentation is an 'infringing' one.

Also unclear in this whole mess is how a software trap would fit in. Suppose Intel was granted the "broader" patent which covered not just the specific transistor layout of the interrupt return handler, but the more general case of returning interrupt context for IA64. Does this preclude software implimentations of that IA64 instruction (which would be particularly relevant to code-morphers like Transmeta, but even to AMD et al which do translation to microcode)?

I'm by far no Patent Lawyer. If the scope is the narrower one, I see no problem, and indeed, is well within the goal of patents. I'm alot let sanguine if the patent covers more than the circuit design, however.

-Erik

Yup... And it's not just Intel, it's everybody.

[Mr Z]

Not that I'm saying that it isn't possible that Intel is doing this, but the fact that they suddenly submitted a bunch of patents hardly constitutes evidence.

Also, as I understand, it's pretty typical for patents on a CPU to be filed all in a burst around the same time the CPU's info's being rolled out to market. Part of the reason for this is that the patent disclosures themselves sit around in the pipeline, gradually making their way to the USPTO. Then the marketing-side of the company decides to do a Release to Market of some more details, so there's a sudden rush to flush the pipeline so that the company doesn't forego any patent protection on those patented ideas that may be presented in the RTM.

At least, that's how it looks like it works here for the patents I was involved with on TI's TMS320C6400 CPU. I won't comment further on the content of those patent applications, or the purpose behind them other than to say I think all the semiconductor companies play the same game here.

So, don't just single out Intel, 'kay? And put your conspiracy theories away. This is just business as usual, and its purpose is to give the originating company an advantage and a defensible barrier against direct competition by cloning. It just so happens that cloning is more important in Intel's world than many other worlds, so people get hypersensitive about it.

--Joe
--
Program Intellivision!

Intel IA-64 Patents not totally illegitimate

[OnanTheBarbarian]

Firstly, I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read the IA-64 architecture book, or at least a decent summary of the contents, should turn the volume down a few notches. Thank you.

This article is sort of silly. "In effect, trying to patent the instruction set itself" is a fairly vague notion; in fact, what Intel is doing is patenting some of their software techniques (expressed usually in small groups of instructions) for prefetching and control/data speculation. Right or wrong, this happens all the time. If some company has a nifty new caching algorithm, they will patent the idea; not the gatelist and implementation.

For example, if you could implement a IA-64 clone by (say) ignoring all prefetch instructions, and just fetching the data when it was needed (effectively turning the chk instructions into the actual loads, for those who are aware of this stuff - you could do it with binary translation). While this may not be a very good idea, it wouldn't infringe their prefetching patent, even if you used the same instruction mnemonics and produced a chip that could run the same binaries.

Personally, I think these patent are potentially disturbing, but put it in perspective with common practice. Read the back of Microprocessor Report sometimes; there are lists upon lists of patents being granted for techniques in exactly the same fashion as above.

As for the patents, I haven't read them, but I suspect that they'll have a tough time with them. IA-64 didn't spring out of nowhere, and a lot of the ideas that went into it follow a fairly predictable (no pun intended) path of development in academia and industry. A fairly stacatto summary of these paths can be found at Historical background for HP/Intel EPIC and IA-64 - if you don't already know something about computer architecture, don't expect to be illumined. The point is, Intel (or more accurately Idea or whatever the Intel/HP collab. is called) hasn't necessarily added that much to prior art here, so the patent may be too broad and subject to either legal attack, or too narrow and easily worked around.

Oh, and to the people cheering on the failure of IA-64, I beg to differ. Some of us write compilers and binary optimizers and code generators, and the death of the x86 architecture would make us very, very happy. The fact that the first IA-64 is going to be a dog isn't really that suprising - it's a huge engineering task and the first chip was always going to be a reference chip more than a serious performance model.

Re:Well of course they want to block competition

[segmond]

Stop blaming the USPTO for everything. It is our problem, we are the cause, yes you and me. Listen very carefully, USPTO doesn't just provide patent for computer technology. The provide patents for every subject you can possible think of in this world. Awarding a patent to anything requires intimate knowledge with that field which enables you to know if the patent is legitimate or not. Therefore as you can see, for the patent office to honor only real and non stupid patents in the computer field. They need real computer professionals, people who intimately understand computers, follow the field, and keep in touch with it. Now back in the days, It was fun working in the patent office because you get to see so much "new?" things and such. But today, it all boils down to money. Will you give up your $90k job for $35k to work for USPTO? And how many slashdotters will do so? Thus as you can see, the problem is me and you. We are greedy, and this is just part of the things we get in return for our "greed."

Well of course they want to block competition

[91degrees]

They're a big corporation. They'd be stupid to do anything else. The real problem is with the USPTO.

As soon as anyone gets a patent they immediately receive a virtual monopoly on that product. It lasts for a lot longer than the product could practically be useful for. It needs to be sorted out, but by whom? The US Government ain't gonna do it. They need the corporate contributions.

Who cares?

[GrandCow]

So let Intel patent their poor-performing functions for the IA-64. How many people will really care? personally I'm not giving it more than a casual thought. When I'm ready to move up to the 64 bit processors, I'm already banking on AMD's 64 bit solution, which is also incredibly fast with 32 bit processes.

This patenting of specific functions smacks of Microsoft tactics, but oh well. This might have worked back with the 16 and 32 bit processors, but since AMD is developing a completely different architecture, the big competition is still going to be there.

Well...

[KillerBob]

I don't really mind Intel doing that. I also don't think Intel will actually enforce such a patent:

They're reliant on Microsoft to stay in business. While people don't really have a choice about Microsoft (don't. You know, and I know, that there are always better options to Microsoft, but do you expect Joe Idiot to install Linux?), they do have a choice about Intel. As more and more people are shying away from Intel in favour of IDT WinChip, Cyrix, AMD, and other giants, Intel would only shoot itself in the foot by enforcing such a move.

Microsoft would not be very friendly to having to write new versions of all their operating systems, each coded to a different architechture. They aren't very happy with having an Alpha and an x86 version of Windows NT. How do you think they'll react to an Intel, and x86, AND an Alpha version of Whistler?