logoalt Hacker News

dlcarriertoday at 4:29 PM1 replyview on HN

Fun fact: the AMD64 patents have expired, with AMD-V patents expiring this year, so there really isn't a need for an x86 license to do anything useful. All that's still protected is various AVX instruction sets, but those are generally used in heavily optimized software, like emulators and video encoders, that tend to be compiled to the specific processor instruction set anyway.


Replies

sylwaretoday at 5:30 PM

As far as I can remember, it is not only a "patent" issue. It seems there are other legal mechanisms.

That said, I would not use a x86_64 CPU without AVX nowadays.

show 1 reply