No comment on your car theory... apples and oranges.
On CPUs, reverse engineering is a legal science in itself. To avoid the patent infringment, companies like AMD have to create the designs in a VERY specific way that involves a third party reverse-engineer.
Simple explanation: If you took an Intel chip, opened it up, figured out how it worked, create you own design based on that info - you just became illegal.
Workaround: You hire a third party to buy an intel chip, open it up, figure out "what it does", write a set of specifications. You buy the specification (this handover is is done VERY carefully from a legal standpoint). Your engineers take the spec and build a new chip that "performs the exact same functions" but they never actually look an the Intel chip.
There was a great article in Boot (Now called Maximum PC) magazine last year about exactly how it's done.
In theory, a company could do the same thing to create an emulator, but I suspect the ULTRA guys didn't.
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No comment on your car theory... apples and oranges.
On CPUs, reverse engineering is a legal science in itself. To avoid the patent infringment, companies like AMD have to create the designs in a VERY specific way that involves a third party reverse-engineer.
Simple explanation: If you took an Intel chip, opened it up, figured out how it worked, create you own design based on that info - you just became illegal.
Workaround: You hire a third party to buy an intel chip, open it up, figure out "what it does", write a set of specifications. You buy the specification (this handover is is done VERY carefully from a legal standpoint). Your engineers take the spec and build a new chip that "performs the exact same functions" but they never actually look an the Intel chip.
There was a great article in Boot (Now called Maximum PC) magazine last year about exactly how it's done.
In theory, a company could do the same thing to create an emulator, but I suspect the ULTRA guys didn't.