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A comment on Homebrew: AVX instructions in Big Sur bottles crash when run in Rosetta 2. Parent comment

Re:Homebrew: AVX instructions in Big Sur bottles crash when ... by varispeed on Saturday December 26, 2020 @08:51PM (#25548133)
Can't they rename it to ABX and switch things here and there? Or get someone to do clean room implementation of ISA specification? You can't patent an API.
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Re:Homebrew: AVX instructions in Big Sur bottles crash when ... by mhh__ on Saturday December 26, 2020 @08:57PM (#25548167)
The patents aren't on the API but what the API does.

Like it or not they are patented https://patents.google.com/patent/US7499962 (FMA, for example)

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Re:Homebrew: AVX instructions in Big Sur bottles crash when ... by xoa on Saturday December 26, 2020 @09:42PM (#25548376)
>Like it or not they are patented https://patents.google.com/patent/US7499962 (FMA, for example)

Yeah, and AVX is also relatively new, intro'd in 2008 and first shipped in a chip in 2011. AVX2 wasn't until 2013. So even with R&D and patents happening years beforehand it'll still be a good long while before they expire (that FMA example being a case in point, not until end of 2026).

Granted in Apple's specific case that's actually not a bad thing. Precisely because AVX is so new, many Macs supported up until the last version or two of macOS didn't have it. So AVX isn't at all a widely expected dependency for the kind of older software that may never get an ARM port and in turn most needs Rosetta 2.

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Re:Homebrew: AVX instructions in Big Sur bottles crash when ... by Const-me on Monday December 28, 2020 @04:13AM (#25557823)
If FMA is patented, how comes ARM has equivalent instructions, called MLA? And GPUs have FMA as well.
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