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A comment on Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive. Parent comment

Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive by monocasa on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @09:57AM (#37999244)
Specifically they're proposing adding the kinds of instructions AArch64 uses to get halfway decent code size.
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Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive by cesarb on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @10:23AM (#37999567)
Wouldn't adding these instructions cause potential patent issues? IIRC, the original designers of RISC-V were very careful to only add instructions which were old enough that they can be assumed to not have any trouble with patents.
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Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive by monocasa on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @10:48AM (#37999920)
Yeah, I'm absolutely concerned about that too. Particularly considering that Apple apparently owns a bunch of the patents around AArch64 and cross-licenses them with ARM, so there's some ownership in there somewhere that lawyers have looked at and think are valid.
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Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive by mort96 on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @11:02AM (#38000175)
Oh, that would be great for Qualcomm. I imagine they wouldn't mind a future where, while anyone can implement the base RISC-V, only the big dogs like Qualcomm can implement the extensions everyone actually targets due to patent issues.

(I would mind that future though.)

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Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive by snvzz on Wednesday October 25, 2023 @09:58AM (#38012847)
>Oh, that would be great for Qualcomm. I imagine they wouldn't mind a future where, while anyone can implement the base RISC-V, only the big dogs like Qualcomm can implement the extensions everyone actually targets due to patent issues.

Not an issue; Qualcomm is a member of RISC-V, thus it has signed the agreement. It has legalese designed to prevent this and further entire categories of legal issues.

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