Firm Sues Sony Over Cell Processor

An anonymous reader writes that earlier this month, Sony received word of a lawsuit from a Newport Beach company called Parallel Processing. They've filed against the electronics giant alleging that the Cell processor, used in the PlayStation 3, infringes on a patent they own. They've made the somewhat outrageous demand that every infringing chip (and console) be 'impounded and destroyed'. From the article at Next Generation: "The patent, 'Synchronized Parallel Processing with Shared Memory' was issued in October 1991. It describes a high-speed computer that breaks down a program 'into smaller concurrent processes running in different parallel processors' and resynchronizes the program for faster processing times ... Parallel Processing said that Sony's alleged actions have caused 'irreparable harm and monetary damage' to the company."

Comments

Cray had prior art/implementation a decade earlier

[xmas2003]

Cray Supercomputer and others were doing all sorts of parallel processing back in the 70's and 80's. Per their history page , the Cray-1 came out in 1976 and various quotes from that page include "first multiprocessor supercomputer (1982) ... multiple 333 MFLOPS processors (1988) ... massively parallel processing (MPP) system (1993)"

What are Sony's lawyers going to patent next - using MPP (multiple parallel painters) to paint a house?

Re:SmashMyPS3

[bilbravo]

Why is this labeled "Troll"? Why not "Funny"?

Re:hah

[Hucko]

bloody terrorists