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Intel Sued Over Core 2 Duo Patent Infringement
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Feb 08, 2008 04:04 PM
from the patents-are-such-a-mess dept.
from the patents-are-such-a-mess dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Intel is being sued over a patent infringement alleged to be in the Core 2 Duo microprocessor design. 'The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is charging Intel Corporation with patent infringement of a University of Wisconsin-Madison invention that significantly improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing. The foundation's complaint identifies the Intel CoreTM 2 Duo microarchitecture as infringing WARF's United States Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled "Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer." WARF contacted Intel in 2001, and made repeated attempts, including meeting face-to-face with company representatives, to offer legal licensing opportunities for the technology.' The text of the complaint [PDF] is also available via WARF's site."
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Submission: Intel sued over Core 2 Duo patent infringement by Anonymous Coward
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Eat any good books lately? (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, that's Barf, short for Barfolomew. He's a mog. Half man, half dog.
[ot] comic-store-guy says: (Score:5, Funny)
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Not a Troll then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a Troll then? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And let's not forget it's extremely expensive to file lawsuits. If anything it's in the best interest of the patent holder to come to some agreement rather than go to court. Sure they'll get their court costs back if they win, but who can afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years?
Trust me, unless they're incredibly wealthy no one wants to go to court
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Disclaimer: I used to work for Intel, and I'm familiar with a lot of the CS/CA people at Madison. I also own Intel stock, and am not looking forward to another $500 million payout to lawyers.
The memory disambiguation table is a variant on a branch predictor (I'm not going to give the exact Intel algorithm). It's obvious. The only reason no one has done it before is that the benefits didn't outweigh the implementation (and especially, v
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Actually, I'm curious why the only two coherent posts at the time of this writing are jumping to the defense of this patent; one of them noting that he hasn't read the link but that nonetheless
Now that you mention it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Universities have seen the patent system as the cash cow it is and haven't thought this through.
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Informative)
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Universities Are Good (Sometimes) (Score:5, Insightful)
Although, you should note that a couple decades ago, universities were not well funded so some senators passed a bill that would allow them to keep patents. Why not, they do the research? Today, universities are still building those portfolios [uspto.gov]. So the joke is kind of on the companies. If they were smart, they should have been dumping millions into universities in the form of donations to keep patents in the corporate sector.
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend. Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
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Just because it's not a troll doesn't mean it's a good patent. It may be that the solution is obvious to one "skilled in the art" even though no one seriously considered the problem before. Just because the university thought of it first doesn't mean it's a good patent.
Of course, I haven't looked at the details of the patent or the case. It may well be a blatant attempt by Intel to rip off a clever idea from the university. My guess is that reality is somewhere in between...
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The way I see it, if you offer to license a technology and then five years later, the company starts using that technology in a new design without licensing it, chances are, the person who holds the patent is not a patent troll. Patent trolls patent something obvious, wait in silence for somebody to do what is covered by their patent, then offer to license and/or sue. If they're offering to license it before the company they're trying to license it to thinks of the idea, unless the idea is fairly trivial,
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W You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free.
As someone who once was a collegiate instructor and employee, I can say for certain that no self-respecting board-of-regents-member college would even think of lowering tuition, for any reason. Scholarships, sure... as long as the money comes out of somebody else's wallet. Student financial aid? Again, they love it - but on the same premise as Scholarships. Work-Study programs? Okay, but it's the equivalent of getting offshore-priced labor on their part.
No, my friend... no way in Hell you'd ever see a
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any decent football programs brings in millions more than they spend. just in case you thought it was wasted money, it usually is not.
While that condition is true for only (roughly) 36-48 universities and colleges nation-wide, I do not argue that those who have a prominent place in, say, the NCAA (US football org) can rake in megabucks per year. (Everyone else scrapes by as best they can, or they simply do without).
Meanwhile, we have, as perfect example, these beasties [utah.edu] (PDF). Don't ask about the price tags.
Granted that at least half of these are working hospitals, but the majority of the inbound dough isn't coming out of the Ute fo
Re:Universities Are Good (Sometimes) (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, yeah, the way this is normally discussed, the conversation usually turns towards someones irrational communist leanings about how "some people" should pay for "everybody else" to go to college. Nevermind that not eve
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I have an engineering degree, which apparently entitles me to such things as straight no time-and-a-half overtime and less wage than any unskilled union laborer.
...It does get a little daunting when everyone I know who went to college makes less than those who didn't.
Your college degree in engineering does not mean that you automatically provide valuable engineering services to a company.
Your engineering degree only entitles you to write "I have an Engineering Degree" on your job applications. After that, it's up to you to land a good job, impress the right people, earn raises and promotions, or create an invention and monetize it, etc.
If you're truly making less wage than any "unskilled union laborer", then perhaps your business skills are lacking? You might be a geni
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Your college degree in engineering does not mean that you automatically provide valuable engineering services to a company.
I wish I had points for you. These days every kid out of high school seems to be shuffling off to college with mom and dad's credit card to get a business management or marketing degree, boozing it up on thursday nights and missing tests on friday mornings, with every expectation that when they finally get through their 4 years of drunken stupor they will emerge into a world that wants to throw money at them for being so highly educated and accustomed to privilege. In reality, however, the degree itself
I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
I worked with the HP PA8000 processor since around 1994. It was an out-of-order CPU, meaning it would execute past cache misses or other long delays to find future instructions which it could do now to save time later. The big win for out-of-order is that it can start cache misses for future work early, acting as a prefetch to bring data into the cache.
Unfortunately, sometimes bad speculation can cause a loop of instructions to result in future instructions causing misses that won't be needed, or other bad effects like starting a divide, and blocking the divide unit for a long time for a divide that won't be used. Recovering from this bad speculation takes time and so it's a performance loss. These are second-order effects--the out-of-order is a big enough win that it almost always outweighs any drawbacks.
All current major CPU designs use out-of-order execution, so everyone's aware of these issues now. I remember at the time looking at a bus trace of some code running on the PA8000 and remarking to the CPU designers at HP that they could improve performance by trying to avoid mis-speculating over and over. At that time, it wasn't worth the silicon space to try to fix it. I'm saying this to show it's obvious speculation can cause some performance issues.
And this is the problem with patents--technology changed so that now it's worth it to spend silicon to fix this problem, to eek out another 1-2% performance. And once it's been decided to fix it, there are some obvious ideas. Like modify the branch prediction hardware to add some state to track that a branch is not being predicted well, to tone down execution after that branch. Or doing whatever it is this patent says to do.
But since academic research often doesn't concern itself with practicalities as silicon real estate, it doesn't surprise me that some university has looked into this problem before Intel. And patents are a way to show you're doing research. However, ask 10 CPU designers how to fix bad speculation, and I would be surprised if several of them didn't give an idea that would infringe on this patent. So is the patent really novel or non-obvious? (I'm aware of the legal definition of obvious, which almost always makes any patent legally non-obvious).
However, I don't necessarily have much sympathy for Intel since they use patents to bar competitors from directly interfacing with their chips. If you control a bus specification, you can add an oddball design quirk, patent it, and thereby block competitors from using your bus. I tried to find the patent for "Intel burst order", but couldn't find it in a few minutes of trying.
Intel is probably a good target to sue for patent infringement because they rely on patents and so are less likely to want to set any precedents weakening their own patents. Generally, they go for cross-licensing, which won't make much sense in this case, though.
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If someone believes otherwise, you probably already know which technology companies you'd feel right at home at.
A more funny response would be to pick up a phone and over the dialtone shout and ask the NSA for my web browsing history. I didn't just give that answer since I'm annoyed at how many people seem to think lying and cheating are OK.
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The invention is the idea, so a flowchart works. The requirement is that you've "reduced the idea to practice." So in this case a logic circuit simulation (not hardware) or more abstract behavioral simulation would be sufficient.
So basically to patent an idea, you should demonstrate that it will work, not
The Final Frontier (Score:5, Funny)
My guess it that it's legit (Score:5, Informative)
It was founded in the 1920s by a professor who invented the process for putting vitamin D in milk.
I believe they also had the patent for homogenizing milk (do you see a pattern here?)
And then, of course, there is WARFarin, the trade name for the anti-coagulation agent dicoumadin, which was discovered when a distressed farmer showed up at the University of Wisconsin's ag school with a bucket of blood from a dead heifer (the pattern continues) and wanted to know what had happened.
Re:My guess it that it's legit (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My guess it that it's legit (Score:4, Funny)
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I happen to work in WARF (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I happen to work in WARF (Score:4, Insightful)
And contrary to your assertions, the whole point is that by giving the universities the right to acquire title to the invention and then imposing commercialization obligations upon them means more of the inventions actually will get to market. Now its true, it some cases this probably doesn't work, for example, a blockbuster technology that everyone would adopt. But that's not most technology. Indeed, doing something that everyone else can do is not usually very profitable.
The reason the patent is a good tool for this is actually a result of the market. Most companies want patent protection because it gives them an advantage in the marketplace. So by allowing universities to patent those inventions, they have a tool to license the technology in order to commercialize it--basically giving the licensing company an extra incentive to actually exploit the technology.
As a significant note, you can read about how infrequently technology was commercialized prior to Bayh-Dole. The numbers are quite staggering. Most "inventions" were never licensed. The federal government retained title to all of its funded inventions, and very little commercialization was done.
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Imagine the gall. A university conducts research that results a useful, novel, and hopefully non-obvious technology, and they have the nerve to patent that technology. Then they have the nerve to ask for licensing revenue, and use the revenue to fund the university so that it can educate more students, and conduct more research, and maintain its facilities. Of
So Intel uses Klingon technology (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Could this one be legit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly not, if these people had to fight Intel for 7 years and still haven't gotten a cent for licensing.
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The FUN thing about non-profits however is that the people who administer the non-profit ARE entitled to draw a salary for running the thing. After all fair is fair, right?
That's why a board of directors controls salaries for the executive employees of the non-profit organization. In principle, they provide oversight and make sure the executives aren't drawing excessive salaries from the organization's revenues. But in practice there's always the chance for corruption or conflict of interest [bizjournals.com].
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Patents (copyright, trademarks, etc) are not bad, they give credit where credit is due...
its most (but not all) of the laws surrounding patents and copyrights, that are bad.
Patents are bad because their only effect is funneling resources from the fast, high-powered, creative, dynamic people in the world to the retarded lazy dullards who think thy only ever have to do one single clever thing in their entire life and should get paid for it from here on in perpetuity.
To the creative people amongst us, who create new things, new processes, new ideas, new concepts, new knowledge, new value on a daily basis, Imaginary Property merely gets in the way. It hampers me daily in my at
Re:Another good example... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you mean that patents are working?
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued. That's just about the craziest reasoning I've seen on slashdot.
But more to your original point, the idea of patents is to prevent "parasitic maggots" that capitalize, copy, and lazily "innovate" using someone else's effort. So, rather than the patent being parasitic, the system that you advocate for actually promotes and fosters laziness all the while minimizing the reward to the originator.
And, there is no system of patents that guarantees payment in perpetuity. Once you consider the fact that it takes years to get through the patent office, in many fields the lifetime of a patent is relatively short in business terms. **
Now, I'm not going to defend EVERY patent out there. Hell, I've seen my fair share that are incomprehensible and/or entirely obvious (both in the legal and technical sense). This does not seem to be the case here--at least not yet.
I'll probably get modded down as a troll and blow what karma I do have since you voice a very popular opinion. But, I'll do it anyway.
[** Copyright, on the other hand, does come much closer. When you're discussing about protecting anything at the "author's life+" then you're talking about a long time relative to any particular individual.]
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Imagine there's a task. Call it a XYZ task. And someone who has to perform it a lot says something like "this would be so much easier if there was an XYZ gadget that would kinda work like this and work by that principle -- that wouldn't be hard to produce. Why doesn't anybody make such a thing?" And that person looks it up on the web and indeed, such a gadget cannot be bought anywhere.
Situation 1: how things should work:
Person goes and starts manufactuing the XYZ-gadget. It's not like he wants to make a
Re:Another good example... (Score:5, Informative)
A quick view of the WARF website has a whole page on the royalty distribution: http://warf.ws/inventors/index.jsp?cid=14&scid=40 [warf.ws]
Of significant note:
You could at least get your complaints right.
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From http://www.warf.org/inventors/index.jsp?cid=7 [warf.org]