Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD"
49 comments
·October 16, 2025mikece
JonathonW
And Cyrix MediaGX (which remained with National Semiconductor after the VIA acquisition) became Geode which was eventually sold to AMD.
tyfighter
This is something I heard through the grape vine years ago, but when you're a very large corporation negotiating CPU purchasing contracts in quantities of millions, you can get customizations that aren't possible outside of gigantic data centers. Things like enabling custom microcode (and development support) for adding new instructions for the benefit of your custom JIT-ed server infrastructure. The corporate entity here is likely a hyperscaler that everyone knows.
jeffbee
Some of the public x86 ISA extensions were things that hyperscalers specifically requested.
sehugg
You mean in 2025 someone is getting paid in their job to mess with x86 segment registers? I'd do that stuff for free.
eigenform
I wonder if this is in response to FineIBT trying to figure out what to use as an undefined opcode? Apparently 0xd6 is being reserved as undefined going forward:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250814111732.GW4067720@noisy....
dzdt
By what legal mechanism is it restricted that not any random company can make their own independent implementation of hardware that interoperates with x86 software?
aidenn0
AMD and Intel have a cross-licensing agreement for patents. Via also has one (two? I don't remember if Centaur and Cyrix's licenses were separate), Via's x86 division was basically disbanded in 2021.
daft_pink
Haven’t the patents for x86 long expired?
trenchpilgrim
Every time new extensions get added to x86 new patents and copyrights are issued to cover those extensions. If you want to make a CPU compatible with what a current compiler produces, you need most of those extensions.
mrpippy
Do those only apply to hardware implementations? Apple and Microsoft are both shipping x86_64 emulators that support SSE/AVX/AVX2
jacquesm
Or you could just limit your compiler to the subset that worked a while ago.
throwaway81523
What happened with Transmeta?
AnimalMuppet
The original ones, sure.
The ones you need for to be compatible with any Intel processor that shipped this side of, say, 2010? No.
okanat
Usually patents and the risk of being sued out of existence despite having the right to implement clean-room clones.
Patents use sly language and legalese spagetti. If your implementation looks similar, you may lose the right to manufacture certain parts or the entire thing. The law is deliberately vague and you are at the whims of the judge.
phendrenad2
Who says it is? There's a long list of emulators and hardware recreatements that proves it isn't.
elzbardico
Patents, licenses. AMD and Intel, AFAIK, have extensive cross-licensing agreements.
mschuster91
There are independent implementations of x86 at least in software - QEMU can do full emulation at the cost of it being dog slow, which is about the only choice for running fully x86 virtual machines on ARM - no aid from Rosetta for anything.
The problem is the hardware magics you need to make x86 actually performant, there's a lot of patents surrounding that area.
fluoridation
>The problem is the hardware magics you need to make x86 actually performant, there's a lot of patents surrounding that area.
Those aren't even patented, they're straight up trade secrets. The relevant IPs concern the ISAs alone. Without doing anything too crazy you could implement x86 on your own silicon and make something that's slower than mainstream processors, but still usable for some things; certainly better than emulation in software, that's for sure.
jacquesm
Do you have an example of such a project? I'd love to do this on an FPGA.
Teknoman117
There's also this fun company (DM&P): https://www.vortex86.com
Their "Vortex86DX3" is basically a dual-core 1 GHz Pentium II system on a chip...
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IlikeKitties
> Mysterious
tssva
Zhaoxin is addressed in the article and also why the author considers it unlikely they are the "corporate entity" in question.
Qem
There are others too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers
senkora
Specifically, the AMD-Chinese joint venture seems like one of the more probable choices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent...
ok123456
Either Chinese or Russian x86 clones. Diplomatically not named.
anticodon
There's only Russian (Soviet) clone of 8086. There was some finished work on cloning 286 but they were never produced in series, since USSR collapsed.
Tevo
Didn't one of the Elbrus CPUs have an x86 translation layer in hardware? Trying to get that to execute code at reasonable speeds, Transmeta style, to use as a replacement to western-supplied hardware wherever you have an explicit need for x86 wouldn't sound particularly far-fetched to me, if I didn't know so little about what's going on within Russia.
Did Cyrix cease to exist or is this someone using their x86 license?
EDIT: That's exactly what it is! They are a joint venture with VIA which acquired most of Cyrix in 1999:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Technologies