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Intel Sued for Patent Infringement

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the familiar-sounding-ideas dept.

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."

3 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Holy extortion, batperson! by Willeh · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
  2. After a quick read by the+real+darkskye · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    --
    Music is everybody's possession.
    It's only publishers who think that people own it.
    Fuck Beta
    ~John Lenno
  3. Bell Labs by SillySnake · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ;-)