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AMD, Intergraph Settle Patent Lawsuit
CTho9305 writes "AMD and Intergraph settled a patent lawsuit over Intergraph's 'Clipper' patents. AMD has agreed to pay up to $25 million between now and 2007 to license the patents. Intel settled a lawsuit with Integraph over the 'Clipper' patents back in March."
Who the hell would patent Clippy? That thing is annoying. And now we are gonna have him in the CPU?
I see you are trying to push onto the stack. Would you like help with that?
I remember there being a Clipper Chip card in Steve Jackson's Illuminati card game. Does this mean our CPUs are spying on us? ;-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Dammit! It seems like everything bad that happens to AMD, AMD turns around and uses it in their favor...
I mean:
- States sue AMD for abusing monopoly powers; AMD pays lawsuit with AMD products that indoctrinate kids (future buyers) into AMD products.
- AMD sues Intel for it's impossible common word trademark of gigahertz in US courts. AMD loses. AMD sues Intel in other world courts; Intel is forced to change name. AMD loses, yet wins. Intel runs out of lawsuit money.
- States sue AMD over alleged undocumented CPU instructions that allow AMD software to run better on Athlon than other software. Source code is released later on that shows AMD lied in court. Nothing happens to AMD!
How is this new lawsuit good for anything but AMD? It's like AMD basically paid $25million to ensure that 3rd party software has a disadvantage - something AMD has already been sued for! This, once again, screws consumers by causing 3rd party manufacturers to pay more for licensing and allows AMD to eat another market.
AMD is really clever at screwing us all in the ass as efficiently as possible.
PS. If you don't get it, don't worry about modding this post.
Intel in the past has boasted profits of $2 billion dollars. AMD has made some substantial headway in the market, but doesn't have nearly as much cash as Intel. Sure it's only $25 million, but for Intel to fork over $225 million dollars and boast profits of $2 billion, it seems that AMD still gets hit hardest. 2% of profit doesn't seem like much, but when you're up against a big time company like Intel, you don't have the option of making many mistakes. Look at Intel deciding to trash their Itanium chips. Intel literally has money to burn.
Clipper was the first RISC CPU. It replaced Intergraph's N32032 based-workstations with a 33Mhz, 5 MIPS (what part of that is "RISC"??) processor. As compared to the 32032, though, it rocked.
Compilers were tricky, Green Hills was the only choice.
Good name for a dog... bushdog, RIP.