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End of Intel-Pin-Compatible CPUs?
sonamchauhan writes ""Intel, Via bury the hatchet" proclaims this news.com article. The settlement reportedly allows Via to build Intel-pin-compatible CPUs for three years more, but Via must cease pin-compatibility after that."
This settlement apparently closes out 27 existing lawsuits.
From the article, 11 legal suits are involved which reference 27 different patents from either side.
According to the article, "The settlement--which involves 11 cases filed in five countries--will essentially make it far easier for Via to sell processors and chipsets to PC makers."
Where did the 27 come from? Oh, wait: "In total, 27 patents were at issue in the various cases."
Man, reading comprehension must be in short supply these days. There were 11 lawsuits involving 27 patents.
Speaking of reading comprehension, the settlement is for the following:
"For the first three years, Intel has agreed not to sue Via for making processors that come with buses and pin structures that are similar to Intel's products. Similarly, Intel has granted Via a license to make chipsets that are pin- and bus-compatible with Intel products for four years, and has agreed not to sue Via or its customers for using pin- and bus-compatible chipsets for another year beyond that."
So they can essientially get away with selling them for FIVE years, not three.
Geez...
This is not at all true. I personally have owned at least four different Super Socket 7 boards (one is in my posession now) which would run either a K6 series processor, or any Socket 7 Pentium processor. Some of them would also run various Cyrix processors. VIA bought Cyrix. Hence, VIA *does* have the rights to some processors which are pin-compatible with some intel processors.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Tualatin (and to some extent, Coppermine) PIIIs and Celerons were incredibly good...clock for clock better than PIV. The "dirty little secret" about Banias/Centrino is that it is not based on the PIV core, but the PIII. This is why they talk about Centrino and Pentium-M, not about where in the Intel continuum the Pentium-M actually belongs.
I want to see the Centrino platform on the desktop. But we never will see it, because it would embarrass Intel and point up how failed the PIV architecture is.
Oh yeah, one more thing. VIA has been selling the CIII as part of the EPIA Mini-ITX platform, not really as a separate chip, and I suspect the tight connection between CIII and EPIA will be even tighter by the time this injunction takes effect three years from now.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Untrue. I took by VIA 133-based mobo w/256 Megs of RAM, which was originally an AMD 750, and, over the period of two years, did the following:
- Upgraded to a 900Mhz Duron
- added 256MB RAM
- Upgraded to a 1.3Ghz Athlon
- Upgraded to a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP
Try doing that with any Intel chip. The socket changed *twice* during the comperable speeds I've listed here. An no new Mobo was purchased, nor was RAM changed (just more bought, for $60 I believe, but it was plain ol' SDRAM, *not* the insanely expensive RAMBUS I'd have been buying at the time if I had been using a P4).