Intel: Steer Clear Of Our Patents (axios.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Intel posted a long blog post yesterday touting the success and evolution of its 40-year-old x86 microprocessor -- the one that powered the first IBM personal computer in 1978 and still powers the majority of PCs and laptops. But it wasn't just a stroll down memory lane. Intel ended the post with a reminder that it won't tolerate infringement on its portfolio of patents, including those surrounding x86. The company wrote, "Intel invests enormous resources to advance its dynamic x86 ISA, and therefore Intel must protect these investments with a strong patent portfolio and other intellectual property rights. [...] Intel carefully protects its x86 innovations, and we do not widely license others to use them. Over the past 30 years, Intel has vigilantly enforced its intellectual property rights against infringement by third-party microprocessors. [...] Only time will tell if new attempts to emulate Intel's x86 ISA will meet a different fate. Intel welcomes lawful competition, and we are confident that Intel's microprocessors, which have been specifically optimized to implement Intel's x86 ISA for almost four decades, will deliver amazing experiences, consistency across applications, and a full breadth of consumer offerings, full manageability and IT integration for the enterprise. However, we do not welcome unlawful infringement of our patents, and we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intel's intellectual property rights. Also read: Intel Fires Warning Shot At Qualcomm and Microsoft Over Windows 10 ARM Emulation.

Comments

Like the AMD-64 instruction set?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Intel's patents... such as the AMD-64 instruction set, which is present in all of Intel's microprocessors, and is patented by ... uh oh.

Re:Like the AMD-64 instruction set?

[NixieBunny]

Intel and AMD have had some cross licensing arrangement from the late seventies, which I'm sure we are not able to view. But patents on a 40 year old architecture might be a wee bit expired by now.

Re:Like the AMD-64 instruction set?

[unixisc]

Intel never hauled AMD to court for AM64. At the time, Intel was hoping to break clean of x86 by introducing the Itanium, while AMD took the tack of extending the x86 instruction set to 64-bit, something that Intel desperately wanted to avoid. In short, Intel tried to shut AMD out of the market the innovative, rather than the legal way: it just happened that VLIW, or EPIC, was such a bust that even Linux hated it, while AMD scored a coup in the market.

After that, Intel tried coming up w/ their own 64-bit extension to the x86, but Microsoft, which by then had already sunk effort into making 64-bit versions of Windows XP based on AMD, made it clear to Intel that they were not gonna support 2 different x86 instruction sets. This was similar to what Microsoft had done in the past, when they forced AMD, Cyrix, Centaur and Winchip to agree on multimedia extensions. Once Intel got this message, they realized that the only clean way of doing this was doing a cross licensing agreement w/ AMD. There are a couple of instructions in the Intel-64 instruction set that are a tad different from AMD64, but otherwise, they are identical.

At any rate, the biggest thing Intel demonstrated was that having sheer expertise at fabs and manufacturing capacity beat the crap out of any inherent architectural superiority any competitor might have: that's how they felled every RISC rival that they had. Like the Alpha & the PA-RISC was way superior to them, but once they could pack 2 or more cores in a package, along w/ the Windows NT kernel being the unified basis of all Windows OSs, it was easy to catch up w/ them from a stance of price points. Intel doesn't have to sue anybody to preserve x86: worst case, they could simply start manufacturing Snapdragons or A10s or whatever, and horn in on the action

Careful not to poke Microsoft

[MightyYar]

Yeah, get into a fight with MS - "I don't know why Windows performs so poorly on your newest, highest-margin chip. Maybe because we had to disable certain compiler options that infringed on your patents. Everything works full-speed on the AMD chips, though. Weird."

Re:Careful not to poke Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason we will not see patent reform is that situations like you describe don't normally happen.

Big companies like MS and Intel can do patent licensing exchanges that cover both parties.

It's the little guys, who don't have the patent portfolio or deep pockets to go to war with, that get stomped on like bugs by the big players and preyed on by the trolls.

The Java Trap

[tepples]

Then I guess we can now consider the x86 and x86-64 instruction sets subject to what Richard Stallman has referred to as the Java Trap. A free program with proprietary dependencies is trapped, and Intel is asserting that the x86 and x86-64 instruction sets are proprietary.

SSE is still patented

[tepples]

Patents last 20 years after filing.* Most x86 programs nowadays rely on "i686" instructions introduced with the Pentium Pro (1995) and Pentium II (1997), whose patents have presumably expired just recently, and the Pentium III (1999), whose patents still subsist. Furthermore, many application developers have stopped building for i686 protected mode in favor of the newer x86-64 long mode.

* A few U.S. patents filed before mid-1995 and granted after mid-2000 still subsist because they're grandfathered into the pre-1995 rules.

Re:SSE is still patented

[pem]

Summary makes it sound like patents are about instruction set emulation, not about the instruction set. Intel has a lot of those.

Re:SSE is still patented

[Rockoon]

SSE2 and later is very relevant. Not so much regular SSE (1)

SSE essentially doubled the number of registers, and although none of the new registers are fully general purpose thats a huge win. The SIMD portion not so much (its a rare programmer that will use the SIMD extensions of their compiler,) and it didnt help that Intel screwed up their SSE SIMD adding all these "horizontal" operations that defeat the entire advantage of SIMD if you use them.

Those horizontal operations are convenient, but if you are doing high performance SIMD then the data within one of your wide registers is all going to be exactly the same kind and isnt very suitable for any sort of horizontal operations. A registers of high performance SSE SIMD contains X3:X2:X1:X0 (all the same component of a 4 different vectors), not W0:Z0:Y0:X0 (a complete 4-component vector.) The terminology in the SIMD world for these two views of the registers are Structure of Arrays (SoA) and Array of Structures (AoS).

There isnt a single GPU that offers horizontal operations in its instruction set like Intel gave to SSE, because it defeats the purpose and would destroy the performance.

Software patents aren't what they used to be

[pem]

And the Eastern District of Texas isn't what it used to be, either.

If Intel was picking on little guys, maybe they'd curl up in the corner. Hard to see it in this case.

I like where this is going.

[Gravis Zero]

What this really shows is that Intel is incredibly insecure because they are highly vulnerable. Intel doesn't really have a leg to stand on regarding patents for x86 so they are just lashing out and hoping to scare off people. They are reverting to their anti-competitive nature because they are now losing on both in the server market (due to AMD's Zen arch) and if Microsoft doesn't blow it, the commodity Desktop market could go to ARM. Intel has really earned this fate and I know they will break the law repeatedly to avoid it. They are getting their just deserts. :)

Translation:

[GameboyRMH]

"The market for new CPUs hasn't been so hot in the last few years, ARM processors are becoming more and more popular, and AMD is starting to bring stiff competition again, so we're going to become patent trolls now to make up for all that lost income. So beware!"

Re:The x86 did not power the first IBM PC

[Major Blud]

The first IBM PC was release in 1981 with an 8088 processor and optional 8087 math co-processor. While I may be wrong on the date, I am sure of the CPU because I have one of the original system right here.

It's semantics really. The 8088 was a cheaper version of the 8086.....it used the 16-bit x86 instruction set, but the less expensive 8-bit data bus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Obligatory:Intel CPU Backdoor Report (May 5 2017)

[Anonymous Coward]

The goal of this report is to make the existence of Intel CPU backdoors a common knowledge and provide information on backdoor removal.

What we know about Intel CPU backdoors so far:

TL;DR version

Your Intel CPU and Chipset is running a backdoor as we speak.

The backdoor hardware is inside the CPU/Bridge and the backdoor firmware (Intel Management Engine) is in the chipset flash memory.

30C3 Intel ME live hack:
[Video] 30C3: Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware
@21:43, keystrokes leaked from Intel ME above the OS, wireshark failed to detect packets.

[Quotes] Vortrag:
"the ME provides a perfect environment for undetectable sensitive data leakage on behalf of the attacker".

"We can permanently monitor the keyboard buffer on both operating system targets."

Backdoor removal:
The backdoor firmware can be removed by following this guide using the me_cleaner script.
Removal requires a Raspberry Pi (with GPIO pins) and a SOIC clip.

Decoding Intel backdoors:
The situation is out of control and the Libreboot/Coreboot community is looking for BIOS/Firmware experts to help with the Intel ME decoding effort.

If you are skilled in these areas, download Intel ME firmwares from this collection and have a go at them, beware Intel is using a lot of counter measures to prevent their backdoors from being decoded (explained below).

Useful links:
The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited
REcon 2014 - Intel Management Engine Secrets
Untrusting the CPU (33c3)
Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops
30C3 To Protect And Infect - The militarization of the Internet
30c3: To Protect And Infect Part 2 - Mass Surveillance Tools & Software

1. Introduction, what is Intel ME

Short version, from Intel staff:

Re: What Intel CPUs lack Intel ME secondary processor?
Amy_Intel Feb 8, 2016 9:27 AM

The Management Engine (ME) is an isolated and protected coprocessor, embedded as a non-optional part in all current Intel chipsets, I even checked with the engineering department and they confirmed it.

Long version:

ME: Management Engine

The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the MCH chip or PCH chip replacing ICH.

The ME consists of an individual processor core, code and data caches, a timer, and a secure internal bus to which additional devices are connected, including a cryptography engine, internal ROM and RAM, memory controllers, and a direct memory access (DMA) engine to access the host operating system's memory as well as to reserve a region of protected external memory to supplement the ME's limited internal RAM. The ME also has network access with its own MAC address through the Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller integrated in the southbridge (ICH or

Re:Intel DOES have a leg to stand on

[pem]

Engineer who purports to know about patents doesn't know that all patents filed in the last 22 years expire 20 years after filing, not 17 years after issue.

Apparently also hasn't been following Supreme Court patent jurisprudence. If Microsoft is emulating these instructions with software and a general purpose computer, there is a good chance that Microsoft's actions will be found non-infringing.

It may be a closer call if instructions were added to make the emulation easier, though.