I don't agree. I think most people would think that "patents" implies that a patent office has granted a patent.

For what it's worth, confusing patents and patent applications is a pet peeve of mine as a former patent examiner. I've seen people criticize the USPTO for apparently granting a patent on some nonsense, but when I look at it, the USPTO rejected the application. The problem is that people can't tell the difference between a patent application and patent. I saw an opportunity to clarify this issue and I took it.

> What matters here is that they have developed this technology.

Having a pending patent, or even a granted patent, does not mean the technology described has been invented. There are many many patents on all sorts of infinite energy devices for example. It should go without saying that none of those work.

They kinda do - microcode translates x86(_64) into micro-opts for actual execution. If you go back far enough to the P6 the actual execution core was essentially RISC [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36380149

I'm surprised they even pursued this line of research, though they may be considering it just as a basic territory claim that they don't have a high expectation of turning into anything. Research into "implicit parallelism" has been done a lot over the years and the consistent result has been that there is a lot less than people intuitively think, and I mean, a lot less. I wouldn't hold out much hope for this... but then again, in a world of nearly frozen clock speeds, it wouldn't take much to stand out.

With Itanium they assumed that "smart compilers" would locally parallelize programs.

Isn't the whole point of OOE that the design is inherently speculative otherwise there's basically nothing to dispatch?

There's a lot of processor state in each core which would be a great place to hide exploits when the microcode is assuming synced operation between cores.

by TFA you mean the fucking article?

why swear? not I have a problem with it