Slashdot Mirror
Intel Sued Over Core 2 Duo Patent Infringement
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Intel is being sued over a patent infringement alleged to be in the Core 2 Duo microprocessor design. 'The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is charging Intel Corporation with patent infringement of a University of Wisconsin-Madison invention that significantly improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing. The foundation's complaint identifies the Intel CoreTM 2 Duo microarchitecture as infringing WARF's United States Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled "Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer." WARF contacted Intel in 2001, and made repeated attempts, including meeting face-to-face with company representatives, to offer legal licensing opportunities for the technology.' The text of the complaint [PDF] is also available via WARF's site."
WARF is old and famous, one of the very first attempts to fund university research by patenting and commercializing research.
It was founded in the 1920s by a professor who invented the process for putting vitamin D in milk.
I believe they also had the patent for homogenizing milk (do you see a pattern here?)
And then, of course, there is WARFarin, the trade name for the anti-coagulation agent dicoumadin, which was discovered when a distressed farmer showed up at the University of Wisconsin's ag school with a bucket of blood from a dead heifer (the pattern continues) and wanted to know what had happened.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
An idea can be an invention. An invention is an object, process, or technique which displays an element of novelty. This looks like a technique for building faster processors, and thus is an invention. It also looks like it is far from obvious, and took considerable research to invent. Those researchers made money, so why not let them license their technology to other companies so they can make money to do more research?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I am a student at the University of Wisconsin, and also happen to work in WARF.(we call the building that the foundation is in WARF as well) The Foundation was set up to protect the discoveries of the university, and has paid for itself many times over, as some of the largest medical patents are held by them. There are also an innumerable amount of Stem Cell patents held by them which in the near future will prove to make a large amount of money. Being a Comp Sci student, I also have heard from some of my professors about issues with companies such as IBM and Intel, whom they have been in contact with, and cannot describe to us lowly students the details of their dealings. However they are definitely not patent trolls. I feel this will make things a little more interesting around the University though, to the point where we can see the true purpose of WARF and how it benefits the University. Bring on a new Comp Sci building!!
arrrg, (like a pirate)
I work at a university and from what I understand most of the patents/patent research is not done with public money - most research money is private. At least in my department and related departments. Actually about 90% of our department's entire funding is from private research money.
"But this one goes to 11!"
A quick view of the WARF website has a whole page on the royalty distribution: http://warf.ws/inventors/index.jsp?cid=14&scid=40
Of significant note:
You could at least get your complaints right.
I only briefly read the patent (due to triple damages for knowingly infringing a patent, it's best to not read any patents ever), and although it's not a typical troll, it has the problem of most patents--it's not that special of an idea.
I worked with the HP PA8000 processor since around 1994. It was an out-of-order CPU, meaning it would execute past cache misses or other long delays to find future instructions which it could do now to save time later. The big win for out-of-order is that it can start cache misses for future work early, acting as a prefetch to bring data into the cache.
Unfortunately, sometimes bad speculation can cause a loop of instructions to result in future instructions causing misses that won't be needed, or other bad effects like starting a divide, and blocking the divide unit for a long time for a divide that won't be used. Recovering from this bad speculation takes time and so it's a performance loss. These are second-order effects--the out-of-order is a big enough win that it almost always outweighs any drawbacks.
All current major CPU designs use out-of-order execution, so everyone's aware of these issues now. I remember at the time looking at a bus trace of some code running on the PA8000 and remarking to the CPU designers at HP that they could improve performance by trying to avoid mis-speculating over and over. At that time, it wasn't worth the silicon space to try to fix it. I'm saying this to show it's obvious speculation can cause some performance issues.
And this is the problem with patents--technology changed so that now it's worth it to spend silicon to fix this problem, to eek out another 1-2% performance. And once it's been decided to fix it, there are some obvious ideas. Like modify the branch prediction hardware to add some state to track that a branch is not being predicted well, to tone down execution after that branch. Or doing whatever it is this patent says to do.
But since academic research often doesn't concern itself with practicalities as silicon real estate, it doesn't surprise me that some university has looked into this problem before Intel. And patents are a way to show you're doing research. However, ask 10 CPU designers how to fix bad speculation, and I would be surprised if several of them didn't give an idea that would infringe on this patent. So is the patent really novel or non-obvious? (I'm aware of the legal definition of obvious, which almost always makes any patent legally non-obvious).
However, I don't necessarily have much sympathy for Intel since they use patents to bar competitors from directly interfacing with their chips. If you control a bus specification, you can add an oddball design quirk, patent it, and thereby block competitors from using your bus. I tried to find the patent for "Intel burst order", but couldn't find it in a few minutes of trying.
Intel is probably a good target to sue for patent infringement because they rely on patents and so are less likely to want to set any precedents weakening their own patents. Generally, they go for cross-licensing, which won't make much sense in this case, though.
How fair is it to demand money for something you didn't contribute to?
Disclaimer: I used to work for Intel, and I'm familiar with a lot of the CS/CA people at Madison. I also own Intel stock, and am not looking forward to another $500 million payout to lawyers.
The memory disambiguation table is a variant on a branch predictor (I'm not going to give the exact Intel algorithm). It's obvious. The only reason no one has done it before is that the benefits didn't outweigh the implementation (and especially, validation) costs. Core 2 is a big enough machine that it's worthwhile.
The sad thing is that Intel has paid a lot of money into Madison. It's a good source for computer architecture interns and graduating PhD's. Most of the profs aren't happy about having to patent their stuff. I doubt they're any happier about university lawyers attacking their patron.