[Pet_Ant]

They want to keep x86 going because they have cross-licensed patents which keep their market share a walled-garden. Anything else would invite competition.

Mind you, it's not just them. MIPS was pretty shady with their patent that even if trapped and implemented in software they sued so you could not compete without licensing and losing your margen. SPARC was open... until UltraSPARC IIRC and then they tried something similar.

https://www.edn.com/mips-lexra-both-claim-victory-in-markman...

> MIPS said the court’s ruling Friday rejected Lexra’s attempt to limit the claims of U.S. Patent No. 4,814,976 to hardware implementations of the unaligned load and store instructions (LWL, LWR, SWL, SWR) of the MIPS instruction set architecture. MIPS argues the claims should also cover software implementations like Lexra’s

That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies.

[throwaway48476]

Multi arch support has never been better and yet x86 is still competitive. Maybe in 10 years everything will be risc V but it doesn't seem to be happening very fast.

[simcop2387]

> That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies.

Not just that, but also by being fairly vanilla/boring about a lot of things in the ISA too. Thus letting the ISA itself be less an impediment to being compatible with ARM and x86_64 as far as behavior for memory ordering and such.

[monocasa]

Those patents are starting to expire. Original x86-64 is probably free and clear now, being released in 2001. The big sticking point for general code out there (cmpxchg16b) was released in 2008, so it only has a few more years left.

If anything this x86 "reshaping" sounds like a way to get some new patent bricks for the wall of the garden.