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Intergraph Injunction Against Intel Suspended For Now
Kilbasar writes "News.com is reporting that the Itanic has hit another iceberg, with a District Court granting an injunction stopping Intel from making the chip. However, the injunction was immediately suspended to allow for another round of appeals, and I don't really see anything coming of this other than Intel paying Intergraph anywhere from $100M to $250M to use their patents."
.....the AMD execs are probably all grinning and giggling like schoolgirls.
Intel is already out $150 million. If they win the appeal, no more lost money. If they lose, they lose another $100 million. Either way they get permission to use the patent. There's really no reason for them not to pursue this.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
Ok. So I get sued by someone for stealing his non-flushable-toilet idea (which is great concept), and he wins the first round in the court and I am ordered to pay him $42 million dollars. So, I make an appeal, which I win. They decide I did not do anything wrong after all. By this appeal I won't get anything back, but I won't have to pay anything more either. By suing me, the inventor got $42 million for nothing?
"It's an untruthatude!"
"Oh, is that like a falsisity?"
"Yes, your honor."
"Oh, now I understandify."
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Intel is not the only chip manufacturer out there. AMD with its clawhammer is looking to be a better option anyway. Its just too bad teh general public doesnt know this.
Yeah, if you're AMD you have to envy Intel's marketing campaign. Nothing says "massive computer power" like a bunch of bald idiots covered in blue bodypaint dancing around like jackasses.
GMD
watch this
They used to. They used to make a range of workstations, using a chip called the Clipper (no relation to the encryption chip). It got killed in the volume economics of Intel. Intergraph then started with a range of Intel workstations, and that business crashed and died, which Intergraph states was due in large part to Intel refusing engineering support in order to coerce them to hand over patent rights. Then they started suing. Intergraph has a long history of litigation with Intel. Been going on and off since 1997, this is just another round of "been there, done that".
Intergraph has been around since about 1970. I worked at Intergraph from 1990-1996. They used to make their own CAD workstations; hardware & software. This was back when a high end CAD workstation would cost 50-75 thousand dollars. The hardware would often include it's own furniture with dual or triple monitors built in and a D-size digitizer.
They were never a consumer product company. They sold workstations to certain engineering and design niches. Their specialty is civil engineering and geographic infomation software. Have you ever looked at a topographic map? At one point all USCGS topographic maps were made on Intergraph workstations. They sell a lot of 911 systems, a spin-off of their other GIS stuff.
They sold some electronic design software, mostly a spin-off of the products they used in house to design their Clipper chip (not the encryption Clipper chip. Boy do I remember the furor when the govt started talking about that!).
They wrote their own publishing software based on a gencoding system similar to SGML. This was used for all of their in-house documentation. TV Guide used an enhanced version of this system for a few years.
I worked in their mechanical division. They were doing object oriented programming in the early 1980's, long before it became popular. Unfortunately, being one of the first, they made a lot of mistakes in the way they chose to implement it, which led to an enormous number of bugs and workarounds in the later products that were built on the same core technology. I could model anything in I/EMS. However, for anything beyond simple models, I'd spend about 40% of my time working around bugs. I/VDS (shipbuilding software) was built on top of I/EMS. They wone a $600 million contract with the Navy back in 1990-1991.
Shortly before the Pentium came out they were realizing that PC's were approaching serious CAD workstation levels. People were not going to pay $35k for a Clipper workstation when they could get a PC maybe half the speed, but one-tenth the cost. They made a couple of deals with Intel and sold their clipper chip unit to Sun. They were one of the first companies to ship a computer with a Pentium inside, and they were the first to ship a multi-processor Pentium machine. Back when a good $2k Pentium PC would ship with 16 or 32MB of RAM. They were shipping a $10k PC with 256MB of RAM, four processors, and a graphics card optimized for major vector graphics work. Note: vector graphics, not animation. Gamers were very disappointed when this $10k machine would do worse on Doom than their $2k machine at home. Still it had major horsepower. Bill Gates used an Intergraph workstation when he introduced Windows NT. When he said "This is the coolest machine in the world!", INGR stock rose about 30% the next day. Then one day as a couple of Intergraph's engineers were working with some Intel engineers to optimize Intergraph's next CAD workstation to work with the Pentium II the Intergraph engineer said "Hey, that looks an awful lot like one of our old Clipper designs." and the patent lawsuits and corporate warfare started.
Unfortunately, though they pioneered a lot of things, they kept getting passed by the new kid on the block. PTC's Pro/Engineer had all of the features of I/EMS with twice the speed, half the cost, and relatively no bugs. (That was back in 1995. Now Pro/E is in almost the same position relative to SolidWorks.) And in hardware, you can't keep selling $10k CAD workstations when 1GB of RAM is about $100. They've spunoff or shut down about 3/4 of their old operations and are concentrating on what they're good at. GIS and suing Intel.