[thomasjames]

Would the Qualcomm chip have hardware hooks for X86 emulation? If so that would open up some legal issues depending on what they were, and how similar they were to Intel hardware patents, but it seems unlikely. In software, however, this has been done before without legal issue. Intel itself even touted the proprietary libhoudini as their answer to large ARM NDK codebase on Android when Intel was trying to compete in the smartphone/tablet space. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13005303/how-does-native... I suppose ARM backed by Softbank and Qualcomm could argue for the right to perform binary translation of X86 on ARM citing Intel's own precedent in the reverse. If they fail, they could countersue for damages accumulated during time Intel was doing the exact same thing to ARM on the mobile platform. Seems like a dead end all the way around.