Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

AnyOldName3 Wrote:You didn't have to pay IBM anything to make an IBM PC compatible computer, so surely we wouldn't need all the licenses if we called it x86_64 compatible.

IBM PC clones used x86 cpus from Intel or other companies with an x86 license. Intel was by far the largest provider of cpus for these systems. A few other companies had x86 licenses due to manufacturing agreements from Intel or in some rare cases legal reverse engineering of derived architectures. The system manufacturers did not make their own cpus. Today all of the x86 licenses up to the 486 are open but the extensions past that such as SSE and x86-64 still require a license from Intel or AMD.

Who's in charge if you can get the licence from Intel or AMD?

Also, if things could have been reverse engineered in the past, what was to prevent people just looking up what instructions existed, and what output was expected, and then getting someone to make something which did the same thing? Is it just the sheer complexity of a modern CPU architecture, or is there some legal reason why some form of reverse engineering had to be used?

Anyway, I hope you realise that I am not genuinely planning to create a tonne of money, and then spend it on producing new CPUs at a loss. If I had that much money, I could afford to make Intel give me Skymont engineering samples, except with 100% unlocked multipliers, and cool them with liquid helium. That has the added benefit of being 100% legal, potentially achievable, and probably much, much cheaper in the long run.

AnyOldName3 Wrote:Who's in charge if you can get the licence from Intel or AMD?

The licenses for different extensions are owned by different companies (whichever company invented them). AMD has some of them and Intel has some of them. For example Intel owns the SSE 1/2 licenses and amd owns x86-64.

AnyOldName3 Wrote:Also, if things could have been reverse engineered in the past, what was to prevent people just looking up what instructions existed, and what output was expected, and then getting someone to make something which did the same thing?

A court ruled that any company that had been given an x86 license in the past could legally reverse engineer derivative architectures since you can't patent a number (286, 286, 486). Most of these companies had been given a license for the original 8086/88 or the later 286 but were abandoned by Intel once Intels manufacturing had reached self-sufficient status. This is why they started naming the microarchitectures, products, and extensions. So that they could properly patent them.

AnyOldName3 Wrote:Is it just the sheer complexity of a modern CPU architecture, or is there some legal reason why some form of reverse engineering had to be used?

Both. Even if you legally could it would take far too long.

Easy solution: time travel, get blueprints for first consumer graphene processor (with before unseen instruction set) from your future self, manufacture a lot of them, pay Microsoft to make a compatible version of Windows, plus make a compatible version of the Linux kernel, pay a lot of popular software developers to make a compatible version of their software, then give the first 10,000,000 machines to schools and/or small businesses.

Eventually, your architecture will gain popularity, especially if sold at a loss to undercut Intel, and at that point, remember the original reason was to make dolphin go faster, and realise you could have got Nintendo and game developer personnel to make an exact PC port of pretty much every game, with full Wiimote support as well as plenty of graphical options.

Yes but you won't be able to get the manufacturing technology needed to make the cpus until it actually exists. It would take 5+ years to get a functioning facility up and running and by that time IBM and other competitors wouldn't be far behind. And yes I know you're not being serious.

Okay, if I needed any precursor technology, I'd get blueprints for that too. Any problem with my time travel plan now?

Yes, no one uses blueprints anymore :3

AnyOldName3 Wrote:Any problem with my time travel plan now?

Actually yes. It assumes instantaneous development and labor. Plus what he said^.

Blueprints reads better than 'All knowledge required to exactly reproduce an item which was not already known'.

Also, approximately instantaneous development would be possible, as you'd get your future self to give you all the knowledge required. From there, it would be a case of telling people to 'build me this by following these instructions', and then to 'build me this using this thing I've had built and by following these instructions'.

The labour wouldn't have to be instant, as you'd have the massive advantage of being at least a decade ahead of other companies technology wise. This would also likely lead to innovations in your manufacturing speeds, helping you maintain your lead, at least until either your patent runs out, or someone discovers and leaks your unpatented technology (which you hadn't patented so no-one else could discover you had the technology).

AnyOldName3 Wrote:Blueprints reads better than 'All knowledge required to exactly reproduce an item which was not already known'.

But that's not what a blueprint is.

AnyOldName3 Wrote:The labour wouldn't have to be instant, as you'd have the massive advantage of being at least a decade ahead of other companies technology wise. This would also likely lead to innovations in your manufacturing speeds, helping you maintain your lead, at least until either your patent runs out, or someone discovers and leaks your unpatented technology (which you hadn't patented so no-one else could discover you had the technology).

This assumes that graphene manufacturing is 10 years away, that it offers substantial benefit at the time, and that it is possible to achieve without leap frogging off of previous manufacturing improvements that must be built first (as is usually the case with photolithography). None of which are currently known. Not to mention that even with the design already layed out it would still take many years to build the necessary infrastructure.

Even with time travel and an endless pot of gold you've still got problems to solve.