Patents expire after 17 years and x86 is 39 years old, so any of the original patents must have expired twice over already.
They no doubt have been filing additional patents over the years. But I'm sure MS and Qualcomm have plenty of their own patents to bargain with.
Also their warning could backfire if it gives Microsoft one more reason to finally walk away from x86 compatibility... not that this is likely to happen anytime soon.
That's under the old law. Nowadays, for patents that issue from original applications filed on or after June 8, 1995, it's 20 years from the earliest filing date upon which priority is claimed (possibly extended to account for delays in the USPTO). [0]
AFAIK, most foreign countries follow the same rule — which is significant, because when one big company sues another for patent infringement, it will usually file parallel lawsuits in every country where (A) the plaintiff owns a patent and (B) the defendant sells the infringing product.
For the benefit of anyone still reading, I'll work through an example.
+ Intel released the 8086 on June 8, 1978 [0]. Tech companies typically file U.S. patent applications just before the first public disclosure of the new technology, so as to preserve any available rights under non-U.S. patent law [1]. So let's assume that Intel filed one of its 8086 patent applications on June 7, 1978.
+ Let's also assume that it took exactly two years for that patent application to be issued as a patent, on June 7, 1980. Under the transition provisions of the "new" law, that patent would have expired on the later of (i) the issue date plus 17 years, that is, June 7, 1997; or (ii) the earliest filing date plus 20 years, that is, June 7, 1998.
Intel implements a thing, say SSE and AVX which were pioneered by Cray 20+ years earlier. So arguably, they took out of patent protection technology and applied it to X86. This is exactly how the patent system was designed to work.
I would argue that what they don't get is a defacto monopoly on the use of vector instructions for X86. Even that specific encoding. Because it is now an issue of compatibility and interoperability. The history of closing an instruction set from the patenting of a self few instructions is atrocious. Millions of entities have expressed solutions to their problems in X86, having to pay a tax to Intel in-perpetuity because of that is bullshit.
Of these I think only SSE is really important. AVX is relatively new (2011) and most software likely can handle CPUs/emulators which lack it. TSX and SGX are Intel-only so any software that can run on AMD doesn't need them.
The point is interesting though Microsoft might be working carefully only to emulate older technology. It's not like they really have to support x86 as well as they support it on the x86 version of the OS. In fact they can get to market faster by not providing deep emulation.
Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility above anything else.
Yes and no. If you're buying a managed service - like Azure HDinsight say - why do you care or even need to know what's under it? The volume buyers of CPUs now are the big cloud operators. If you're buying a tablet and consuming "apps", then why do you care about compatibility with old Windows desktop applications?
They no doubt have been filing additional patents over the years. But I'm sure MS and Qualcomm have plenty of their own patents to bargain with.
Also their warning could backfire if it gives Microsoft one more reason to finally walk away from x86 compatibility... not that this is likely to happen anytime soon.