HP Pays Intergraph $141m to Settle Patent Dispute

foxed writes "HP has settled a patent dispute with Intergraph. Intergraph claim the caching in Intel's Pentium processors violates their patent. Intel, AMD, Dell and Gateway made similar settlements last year."

Comments

Intergraph's Patents

[gowen]

Intergraph's patents are numbers 4,899,275, 4,933,835 and 5,091,846.

Just don't ask me what any of that means...

Re:Intergraph's Patents

[gowen]

computer chip design isn't notable enough in their list of products to actually be included in such a short little blurb. So they patented an idea outside their main field... for what reason?

Because they used to design chips, but stopped in the mid-1990s. These patents date from 1992, when Intergraph were a chip designing company.

Problem is that Intel and company did not license and probably did not dig through the patent library to find this idea and benefit directly from Intergraph's research/think tank.

Actually, they did (or at least it's likely that they did). Intel and Intergraph worked very closely in the 1990s, and both shared IP under NDAs. Shortly after they stopped co-operating (1997) Intergraph sued Intel, and although Intel dragged it out for 6 years, Intergraph absolutely creamed them in court.

Re:Intergraph's Patents

[rfreynol]

Actually, Intergraph has a long history of chip and hardware design. They started out as a contractor on the Apollo program and by the 1980's were producing their own VERY power Unix workstations and servers running on their CLIPPER chip.

They did their own Chip design and even did some work on the SPARC for Sun.

Unfortunately, they were also run by a bunch of geeks that didn't know squat about business. That, coupled with them giving up on the Unix market for Windows NT back in 1993 (about 2 years too early) caused them to take quite a fall.

In the process of moving to a Wintel platform, they worked closely with Intel and that is where they got entangled. Intergraph needed Pentiums (and lots of them) to power their workstations and Intel tried to strong arm them into turning over some of their technology. I can assure you that the cache/MMU in the current Intel chip line did in fact come from Intergraph.

Re:What is the legal basis for this?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Did HP have anything to do with the design of the cache in the Pentium? If not, why are they paying anything? Surely it's up to Intel to pay royalties on patents they breached, not their customers. I particularly can't see any way Gateway could have been liable for this.

That's not how patents work I'm afraid. In the words of the USPTO:

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

Note the word use in the text above.

Re:Integraph eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is exactly the same company...

Some of their older Intel-based servers and Workstations were pretty hefty as well. We had a couple of them and they were very fast and well build machines indeed.

I remember that Jerry Pournelle of Byte/Chaos Manor fame liked Intergraphs workstations as well. /IntaGraphFanboy

Re:Intergraph/Intel mirrors SCO/IBM

[stilwebm]

In Intergraph's case, Intel engineers were up against a wall circa the late 486/early 586 timeframe, and came to Intergraph for help. Intergraph opened their IP portfolio to Intel, taught the Intel engineers how to design a modern CPU, and Intel proceeded to steal the entirety of that IP portfolio - hook, line, and sinker.

Intergraph knew very little about making CPUs. They used MIPS CPUs before moving to Intel. What they were good at, was making fast buses between memory, the CPU and peripherals. They made workstations that rendered 3D in real time, way before AGP came around. Intergraph partnered with Intel because they needed cheaper processors in their platform to compete. Intel needed better memory-cpu-peripheral buses. Intergaph was to help Intel if Intel would provided details about their processors so Intergraph could make high speed buses, primarily for 3D devices. Intel never provided access to their specifications, leaving Intergraph hanging, so they sued. Then Intel used technologies that Intergraph shared with them, so they sued on patent infringement as well.

Re:How is HP reliable?

[geoffspear]

No, you're punished for knowingly violating a patent you knew about.

They should have checked in advance, and then either not used the patented device, or demanded that their supplier indemnify them. Yes, it would be stupid to check for patents on a technology if you're just going to use it anyway.

Re:Small OEMs

[gowen]

I'm a small OEM and have shipped a few intel processor based machines

No. You should be protected by
section 2-312 of the Uniform Commerical Code.

Unless otherwise agreed a seller who is a merchant regularly dealing in goods of the kind warrants that the goods shall be delivered free of the rightful claim of any third person by way of infringement or the like...

Thanks to an anonymous coward who pointed this out to me.

Re:Patents and monopolies are evil

[gowen]

They've had those patents for more than 10 years without enforcing them

Untrue. They sued Intel in 1997.

Oh, I know, lets develop this cache stuff for our new processors, then not produce them

They tried to produce them in association with Intel, but Intel screwed them over. So Intergraph sued, and Intel then tied them up with lawyers for 6 years.