Intel Sued for Patent Infringement

mfh writes "All Computers Inc. has filed suit against Intel for infringing on US Patent (5,506,981). Apparently Intel utilized patent-conflicting circuitry to determine the frequency of the input signal to the microprocessor, including Pentium processors. All Computers is asking for the tidy sum of $500 million USD."

Comments

Holy extortion, batperson!

[Willeh]

The way i see it, the basic principle of determining frequencies by using a step-up board is pretty common. I didn't more than skim the patent, but it seems to me this kind of stuff has been used for years in a similar sort of way in radio's and other tuning equipment.

So either these guys are gonna be the SCO of the semi-conductor world, or their crack is pretty good.

This might be good

[Syberghost]

$500 million might be enough to get this changed; it might be cheaper to bribe enough Senators to get a bill through.

In Related News......

[write_with_numbers]

Coke is filing suit against Pepsi for making a drink with sugar and carbonation and Thomas Edison's grandson is filing suit against GE for using his grandfather's invention of electricity in many of their products without Edison's written permission. I'm really begining to take more interest in the few companies that actually work instead of trying to sue to get ahead.

Re:Is it really worth it to them?

[ivan256]

So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't? Would it really benefit society if people could only earn money through either manual labor, or being part of the already established business community?

Patents are one of the few ways new, little companies and inventors can get into the market. Without them the only entities that would ever make money are the established players. Patent abuse and a broken patent system, by themselves, don't make patents in general a bad thing.

As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive.

People finding things ludicrous without non-religous justification, or offensive for non-sexual reasons don't typically change policy.

After a quick read

[the real darkskye]

It looks like the patent is describing any method of running hardware components at speeds faster than the frequency line on the board.

This vaugly could be anything including having a clock multiplier on the CPU (Look out AMD, Cyrix, Transmeta, VIA, HP, IBM, Apple, anyone else!) however as it was only filed in '93 I think intel can claim prior art with this, given the 80486 DX2/4 used frequency multipliers .. although I can't recall when they were released.

That aside, its now friday afternoon and its time to clock watch to 5pm!

Bell Labs

[SillySnake]

I had a professor tell me this story, and never bothered to go back through and check on the truth, but I assume it to be true :)
He said that Bell labs actully had to wait several years for a patent on the idea of an Field Effect Transistor (FET) to expire before trying to create their own. However, it was while they were trying to create the FET that the BJT was mistakenly invented.
Just through it was an interesting story about the effects that pattents have on society.. Can you imagine where the computer world might be if we'd gotten the transistor 5 years earlier or even more? It's an exciting thing to think about, and raises questions about patents.. Perhaps we could have cured cancer with that extra computing power.. Maybe we could have cured AIDs.. Or maybe our video games would be that much cooler ;-)