Intel cautions Qualcomm and partners over possible patent infringement from x86 emulation

Intel appeared to have issued a veiled warning to Qualcomm and its partners over possible patent infringement with the implementation of x86 emulation in upcoming laptops.

The development comes after Qualcomm and Microsoft announced that Windows 10 PC apps will get support for ARM chipsets, specifically, Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs. The two companies more recently announced their partnership to launch Qualcomm-powered Windows 10 laptops in the future along with select OEMs.

According to experts, Qualcomm's ARM platform was set to run both desktop x86 Win32 apps as also Universal Windows apps. It was also known that Qualcomm and Microsoft's support for desktop x86 Win32 apps on ARM chips will be provided in the form of a native emulator within Windows 10. Regular MSI and EXE packages will work, but since everything was being emulated on a software level, app performance would not be as good as on x86 chips made by Intel, according to experts.

Meanwhile, Intel said in its blog post that it was aware that "some companies may try to emulate Intel's proprietary x86 ISA without Intel's authorisation."

Intel asserted that it carefully protected its x86 innovations, and did not widely license others to use them. ''Emulation is not a new technology, and Transmeta was notably the last company to claim to have produced a compatible x86 processor using emulation (''code morphing'') techniques. Intel enforced patents relating to SIMD instruction set enhancements against Transmeta's x86 implementation even though it used emulation.

According to commentators, besides Qualcomm, Asus, HP, and Lenovo all planned to introduce sleek, fanless Windows tablets and notebooks in time for the holiday shopping season that will take advantage of the power efficiency of the Snapdragon 835, originally designed to power smartphones.

Intel did not say whether or not those devices would violate its intellectual property rights, but it was clear the company was prepared for patent litigation, they add.