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SGI Sues ATI for Patent Infringement
Ynsats writes "The Register is reporting that SGI is filing suit against ATI for patent infringement. The suit alleges that ATI violated patent number 6,650,327, "Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering", which was filed in 1998 and granted in 2003, in its Radeon graphics cards. This is coming fast on the heels of AMD's announcement of the intention to buy ATI for $4.2B and it doesn't seem to be swaying AMD's intentions. AMD hopes to finish the takeover by the end of this year. SGI has also issued an ominous statement stating that they have plenty of intellectual property left and there will be more litigation to come."
If you can't beat them, sue them...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Sorry SGI, you are done. Your products are done, all of your competition can bring better products to the table. This isn't 1998 where you brought these trendy cases and we all "ooed" over them.
Bye bye.
I submitted this yesterday after seeing it on OSNews, but my question was: is this becoming the new business strategy for technology companies that failed in their traditional business? Just on the heels of rejoining the NASDAQ and after a period of bankruptcy instead of a restructure or new plan they announce litigation. Is SGI going to use any capital gained to rejoin the table as a technological competitor, or are they following the steps of SCO?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The SCO-iffying of sgi. I used to love SGI. I still love their old hardware, from Indys to Reality Engines, from the 4D85 I started on (before they gave fancy names) to the Onyx Infinite Reality that we ran virtual sets on in real time long before PCs could even think about doing this stuff, and the sgi's ran a lot of our live TV well into the PC era, doing a better job than PCs could years after the sgis were released.
But now it's over and sgi has become an office with a few lawyers, and this is what the call emerging from bankrupcy.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Patent Troll? Were they honestly hording patents or were they innovating?
It seems fair that SGI, who was very big in the game not that long ago and can no longer compete, should be able to collect dues for their patented ideas. I know nothing about the patent on hand, and whether or not it was obvious at the time, but I'm giving SGI the benefit of the doubt because of their cool blue Indigo systems.
My only question to SGI is why didn't you start defending the patent earlier? "Because we thought we were financially stable" won't make for a good answer.
I hear they make a good portion of their current income from real-estate leases to Google.
Marques Johansson
Anyone else remember they gave NVidia the same treatment back in the heady day's of '98? This is nothing new for SGI. "Rattle the cage, and try to stave off the end with another lawsuit." How did that last one work for SGI? Not so well....
The problem is that this patent fails the obviousness test about 100%. The patent itself, if you follow the link, says that "People have used floating point before, just in emulation because hardware cost too much. Now that hardware is cheap, we just do floating point rasterization from the framebuffer instead of through emulation."
I don't understand how the USPTO granted a patent that says "This method has been known for some time, but now we just have the capability to do it."
I'm all for granting legitimate patents (they do actually exist) but this one does not pass the sanity check.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
SGI did have their heyday. They had many good innovations, and at the time they also made a lot of money on those innovations for their employees and investors. That's all teriffic.
But now that it's over, what good will be had by forcing us to pay an "SGI Tax" on anything to do with graphics for the next N years?
SGI is the market leader in high performance graphics.
Someone makes cool 3d video game with a VGA.
SGI laughs, continues selling workstations for $10k.
Someone releases a commodity 3d graphics card.
SGI laughs, continues selling workstations for $10k.
Someone releases a fast commodity 3d graphics card.
SGI laughs, but to placate the market, throws half-hearted PC graphics effort over the wall (Fahrenheit, x86 workstations, etc.) Effort is severely overpriced due to SGI's existing value network/cost structures. No one buys it.
SGI thinks little of it, decides to let the commodity vendors have their razor thin margins, they're doing them a favor by leaving all of the fat deals to them, right?
Commodity 3d graphics vendor offers lucrative deal to SGI top talent.
SGI top talent, looking for new and exciting and more money jump ship.
SGI, instead of getting the message, continues to focus on moving up-market and ignoring commodity markets.
Commodity graphics grows into a dozens of billions of dollar market.
SGI participates in none of it. Dies instead.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
If AMD can buy ATI for $4.2B, can't they simply add a few bucks to buy SGI too?
Why else would SGI be doing this? Eventually, either they'll sue the right deep pockets and get bought out, or another company will take a look at their growing list of pending lawsuits and decide they want in on that action. At least, that's the plan.
The problem is that this patent fails the obviousness test about 100%.
If it's so obvious, why didn't you do it first?
Implementing floating-point framebuffers is non-trivial problem, and SGIs solutions to doing so are why they deserved the patent.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Except SGI could actually have legit patents.
SGI should have thought of spinning off it's graphics IP a long time ago. Take a look at ARM. They make nothing but IP and money.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A once great company behaving like a patent troll is still a patent troll.
A patent is intended to be a device to protect non-obvious research and innovation from being stolen so that you can reap the rewards in your product line. In this case, the research was not stolen, as ATI thought of it too. And SGI no longer has a product line to protect.
They're suing ATI because they have no way left to make money. Period. They're not protecting their own product line or income stream, as they have neither. They're not even protecting their own research, as ATI developed this independently. They're just in their death throes, and are suing.
Remember, patent mutually assured destruction doesn't work if one company no longer has a product line to destroy. Dying companies have a habit of taking others with them.
The ______ Agenda
If it's so obvious, why didn't you do it first?
Ok, so maybe SGI did it first. Then let's give them a nice gold-plated medal or something. Regardless of how much time and money you spent training for the competition, winning a race shouldn't give you the right to charge an arbitrary fee to anyone else who wants to run that course in the future (or prevent others from doing it at all).
Good catch on that. Not many people will pay attention. I bet it took them 3 years to file the lawsuit because law moves slower than technology, and they had to take time to build a claim. I'd like to give SGI the benefit of the doubt here and say they're not a patent troll. You don't just file a lawsuit and hope for the best. As a business you need to make sure that your decision can be backed up (otherwise you become SCOX). Of course, I bet the bankruptcy had a lot to do both with the decision to file and the delay in filing. Plus, we don't know if SGI approached ATI before this and offered a deal over litigation.
Go read the background of this patent. The patent itself admits that there was plenty of graphics prior art that used floating point values to do the calculations. All they are claiming a patent on is implementing this system in hardware! And they include a line in their patent about how it has now become possible/desierable to implement the floating point stuff in hardware.
To be fair it seems their 'advancement' is that they kept the data in floating point format in the framebuffer rather than converting it to fixed point. Now their implementation of this approach probably contained some genuine advancement but just the notion of doing everything in floating point is pretty fucking obvious.
What I don't understand about this is that surely SGI has some much more substantial patents in their pockets. Is the problem that they gave them away with OpenGL/don't want to scare people away from opengl?
My personal guess is that SGI isn't serious about pursuing this particular patent infringement. Rather they are using a very broad and simple patent to go on a fishing expedition about ATI's hardware. During discovery on this patent SGI will be able to get details about how ATI's hardware/software works that they would otherwise not be able to get. I suspect SGI thinks ATI is infringing on a more substantial patent somewhere and is going to use the discovery during this case to find out.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The difference is that the Altix is a shared memory machine and Blue Gene/L is a cluster with distributed memory. You can always make bigger and bigger clusters (although it is quite a technical trick to make them as large as BG/L), but shared memory machines like the Altix are are a different ball of wax. The difference is that an Altix 4000 can be called *a* computer more readily because it actually runs *one* instance of the OS across 512 processors.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Quit making up nonsense excuses to forgive corporations who shit on their customers. The specs required to write video drivers do not tell anyone anything that makes it easier to sue for patent infringment. The list of features on the nvidia and ati websites gives as much info for patent trolls as programming docs would. It just tells you what functionality is supported, and how to tell the card to do it.