Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, says x86 emulation is a patent minefield
Alright, I&#x27;ll come out of retirement to hit this dead horse another lick.<p>&quot;if WinARM can run Wintel software but still offer lower prices, better battery life, lower weight, or similar, Intel&#x27;s dominance of the laptop space is no longer assured.&quot;<p>Peter. My man. I laughed. I cried.<p>For the millionth time, the ARM ISA does not magically confer any sort of performance or efficiency advantage, at least not that matters in the billion+ transistor SoC regime. (I will include some relevant links to ancient articles of mine about magical ARM performance elves later.) ARM processors are more power efficient because they do less work per unit time. Once they&#x27;re as performant as x86, they&#x27;ll be operating in roughly the same power envelope. (Spare the Geekbench scores... I can&#x27;t even. I have ancient published rants about that, too).<p>Anyway, given that all of this is the case, it is preposterous to imagine that an ARM processor that&#x27;s running emulated(!!!) x86 code will be at anything but a serious performance&#x2F;watt disadvantage over a comparable x86 part.<p>This brings me to another point: Transmeta didn&#x27;t die because of patents. Transmeta died because &quot;let&#x27;s run x86 in emulation&quot; is not a long-term business plan, for anybody. It sucks. I have ancient published rants on this topic, too, but the nutshell is that when you run code in emulation, you have to take up a bunch of cache space and bus bandwidth with the translated code, and those two things are extremely important for performance. You just can&#x27;t be translating code and then stashing it in valuable close-to-the-decoder memory and&#x2F;or shuffling it around the memory hierarchy without taking a major hit.<p>So to recap, x86 emulation on ARM is not a threat to Intel&#x27;s performance&#x2F;watt proposition -- not even a little teensy bit in any universe where the present laws of physics apply. To think otherwise is to believe untrue and magical things about ISAs.<p>HOWEVER, x86-on-ARM via emulation could still be a threat to Intel in a world where, despite its disadvantages, it&#x27;s still Good Enough to be worth doing for systems integrators who would love to stop propping up Intel&#x27;s fat fat fat margins and jump over to the much cheaper (i.e. non-monopoly) ARM world. Microsoft, Apple, and pretty much anybody who&#x27;s sick of paying Intel&#x27;s markup on CPUs (by which I mean, they&#x27;d rather charge the same price and pocket that money themselves) would like to be able to say sayonara to x86.<p>The ARM smart device world looks mighty good, because there are a bunch of places where you can buy ARM parts, and prices (and ARM vendor margins) are low. It&#x27;s paradise compared to x86 land, from a unit cost perspective.<p>Finally, I&#x27;ll end on a political note. It has been an eternity since there was a real anti-trust action taken against a major industry. Look at the amount of consolidation across various industries that has gone totally uncontested in the past 20 years. In our present political environment, an anti-trust action over x86 lock-in just isn&#x27;t a realistic possibility, no matter how egregious the situation gets.<p>So Intel is very much in a position to fight as dirty as they need to in order to prevent systems integrators from moving to ARM and using emulation as a bridge. I read this blog post of theirs in that light -- they&#x27;re putting everyone on notice that the old days of antitrust fears are long gone (for airlines, pharma, telecom... everybody, really), so they&#x27;re going to move to protect their business accordingly.<p>Edit: forgot the links. In previous comments on exactly this issue I&#x27;ve included multiple, but here&#x27;s a good one and I&#x27;ll leave it at that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;nvidia-30-and-the-riscification-of-x86&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;nvidia-30-and-the-r...</a>