I'm really interested in the Mill architecture too, but I've always wondered what it's target market would be. Does it offer a power-performance-price profile that hasn't been serviced yet? Or maybe it's faster/cheaper/less-power all-round compared to any other general purpose CPU? It's hard to know without real performance metrics.

Also curious nobody else tried to implement the core ideas independently in that time.

Ah, so they jus waiting until their patents expire ? Or maybe they waiting until some needed-by-them patent expire ?

Look: MS did not manufacture mouses until mouse patend got famous for making no money. And then it was global must to have. It was impossible to make singleton in C++ in 200x but atomics was described in literature (even in SICP) and only when patent expired Intel made it everyday tool...

Patents should be automatically invalidated before half human life time is wasted.

IMO patents should have mandatory FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory) licensing. With higher (2x?) license fees allowed if a working prototype has been submitted to the patent office instead of just a design.

Incentivize new inventions, but keep profits fair. Incentivize working designs over on-paper ideas. Promote the progress of useful inventions over rent-seeking.

> It was impossible to make singleton in C++ in 200x but atomics was described in literature (even in SICP) and only when patent expired Intel made it everyday tool

I'm curious about what you mean here. Are you taking about an atomic compare and swap operation? I'm sure these have been implemented in processors back as far as the 90s, if not earlier.

Yep, atomics was implemented earlier but, as far as I know, they was patented and only after patent expired Intel put them in. So, how many years it take to "popularize" atomics ? Ten, 20 years ?

I suppose multi-threading wasn't a huge problem for most applications. But I'm not sure how a mutex could ever be properly implemented in a multithreaded environment without an atomic compare and swap, but they've certainly been a thing for a very long time. In terms of atomics as a assembler intrinsic, I think that only became popular when intrinsics started being supported in C compilers, but I doubt the patent was holding that back - unless you know different?

>MS did not manufacture mouses until mouse patend got famous for making no money

MS started making mice in 1983 when they released Word.

And how this detail is relevant to this discussion ?

MS decision to make mice had zero to do with any patents. They simply had no products utilizing them before Word.

So once again patents have locked up something useful.

To be fair, it's a number of useful innovations that have taken decades of research, and would not have otherwise been done without property rights grants some sort of pay-out at the end. And many of the ideas would require a dramatic overhaul of how compilers generate and optimize code, and so they couldn't just be co-opted by existing processor families without breaking compatibility.

Patents do not apply to academic research, do they? Amateurs can also post some VHDL on github without fear of retribution, so still strange.

For commercial application, if the ideas are good, and the patents valid, someone could just license them. Or are they sitting on an inbox full of desperate licensing requests that they're ghosting while whining they can't get funding?