Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD"

https://www.phoronix.com/news/x86-Opcodes-Not-AMD-Or-Intel

85•unsnap_biceps•2h ago

Comments

IlikeKitties•2h ago

> Mysterious

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin

Qem•1h ago

There are others too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers

senkora•1h ago

Specifically, the AMD-Chinese joint venture seems like one of the more probable choices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent...

tssva•1h ago

Zhaoxin is addressed in the article and also why the author considers it unlikely they are the "corporate entity" in question.

ok123456•1h ago

Either Chinese or Russian x86 clones. Diplomatically not named.

anticodon•1h ago

There's only Russian (Soviet) clone of 8086. There was some finished work on cloning 286 but they were never produced in series, since USSR collapsed.

Tevo•27m ago

Didn't one of the Elbrus CPUs have an x86 translation layer in hardware? Trying to get that to execute code at reasonable speeds, Transmeta style, to use as a replacement to western-supplied hardware wherever you have an explicit need for x86 wouldn't sound particularly far-fetched to me, if I didn't know so little about what's going on within Russia.

mikece•1h ago

Did Cyrix cease to exist or is this someone using their x86 license?

EDIT: That's exactly what it is! They are a joint venture with VIA which acquired most of Cyrix in 1999:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Technologies

JonathonW•1h ago

And Cyrix MediaGX (which remained with National Semiconductor after the VIA acquisition) became Geode which was eventually sold to AMD.

eigenform•1h ago

I wonder if this is in response to FineIBT trying to figure out what to use as an undefined opcode? Apparently 0xd6 is being reserved as undefined going forward:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250814111732.GW4067720@noisy....

dzdt•1h ago

By what legal mechanism is it restricted that not any random company can make their own independent implementation of hardware that interoperates with x86 software?

mschuster91•1h ago

There are independent implementations of x86 at least in software - QEMU can do full emulation at the cost of it being dog slow, which is about the only choice for running fully x86 virtual machines on ARM - no aid from Rosetta for anything.

The problem is the hardware magics you need to make x86 actually performant, there's a lot of patents surrounding that area.

fluoridation•1h ago

>The problem is the hardware magics you need to make x86 actually performant, there's a lot of patents surrounding that area.

Those aren't even patented, they're straight up trade secrets. The relevant IPs concern the ISAs alone. Without doing anything too crazy you could implement x86 on your own silicon and make something that's slower than mainstream processors, but still usable for some things; certainly better than emulation in software, that's for sure.

jacquesm•1h ago

Do you have an example of such a project? I'd love to do this on an FPGA.

phendrenad2•1h ago

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer

Google is your freeeend

elzbardico•1h ago

Patents, licenses. AMD and Intel, AFAIK, have extensive cross-licensing agreements.

aidenn0•1h ago

AMD and Intel have a cross-licensing agreement for patents. Via also has one (two? I don't remember if Centaur and Cyrix's licenses were separate), Via's x86 division was basically disbanded in 2021.

phendrenad2•1h ago

Who says it is? There's a long list of emulators and hardware recreatements that proves it isn't.

daft_pink•1h ago

Haven’t the patents for x86 long expired?

trenchpilgrim•1h ago

Every time new extensions get added to x86 new patents and copyrights are issued to cover those extensions. If you want to make a CPU compatible with what a current compiler produces, you need most of those extensions.

jacquesm•1h ago

Or you could just limit your compiler to the subset that worked a while ago.

trenchpilgrim•1h ago

Sure, but that limits what code you can use. A lot of consumer software won't work without the SSE extensions, for example.

jacquesm•1h ago

You'd expect some kind of fall-back in place for older CPUs, no?

trenchpilgrim•1h ago

No, often any fallback would be unusuably slow anyway.

gary_0•51m ago

Some of SSE is required as part of the x86_64 ABI, and also new versions of Windows (infamously, now) add required CPU extensions so software will often base its requirements on that. And SSE4x is ubiquitous enough (99% of PCs) that some software/games will just require it and simply crash if it can't use those instructions.

wmf•1m ago

It looks like many Linux distros require x86-64-v2 from 2008 and they're preparing to move to v3 from 2013. At this rate they'll never support a level with expired patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...

Qem•45m ago

SSE2 was released circa 2000[1]. Assuming a patent lasts for 20 years, it should be expired for several years now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2

trenchpilgrim•28m ago

There are further versions of SSE (SSE4 is pretty much a hard requirement on Windows) and a follow-on series, AVX. AVX-512 is from 2016 and AVX10 is from 2023.

Qem•17m ago

That makes me wonder if all those vector extensions pilling on top of each other were really that necessary, or if they are mostly a means of keep churning out patents to delay expiration.

Is it possible to just improve the original SSE extensions in a logical backward compatible way? Similar to what AMD did to x86, widening it to x86-64, dooming Intel efforts to push the incompatible Itanium architecture?

trenchpilgrim•5m ago

No, the newer extensions are different opcodes. It's like extending an API, you can't change old function signatures, you have to add new ones. The new ones are legitimately useful, most video games and media production software use them a lot.

throwaway81523•2m ago

What happened with Transmeta?

AnimalMuppet•1h ago

The original ones, sure.

The ones you need for to be compatible with any Intel processor that shipped this side of, say, 2010? No.

sehugg•1h ago

You mean in 2025 someone is getting paid in their job to mess with x86 segment registers? I'd do that stuff for free.

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Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD"

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