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by Koshkin 744 days ago
The title of the piece is somewhat misleading - the actual point was, "there is no good technical reason for the lack of free, open ISAs."
1 comments

I wonder why this hasn't been an issue for Apple (or maybe it has?).
Apple was a co-founder of Arm [0]. "Arm was officially founded as a company in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, which was a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and VLSI Technology (now NXP Semiconductors N.V)."

I'm not sure of their exact licensing terms, but I'm sure as a co-founder they're favourable.

[0] - https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-official-history

I seem to have replied to the wrong comment. I meant to reply to the one about Intel threatening Microsoft about emulating x86 on ARM.
Ah. In that case, I'm not sure what the difference is. Both Rosetta 2, and WoW are translating blocks of code to native, not doing a CPU emulation...

I'm wondering if Apple actually has some sort of license to do the translation. Rosetta 2 isn't installed by default. On the PS3, Sony had a pile of media codecs available, and you had to enable each one manually to generate a license key... which I'm sure was to avoid paying for codecs that people aren't using. Rosetta requiring an installation could just be space saving, or could be a sign they're paying a license per install, and avoiding the cost when it's not needed.

They licensed the ARM ISA from ARM.