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."
I happen to recognize two of the patent owners: Andreas Moshovos and Gurindar Sohi. Guri in particular is an established member of the Computer Architecture research community. He's worked on many different aspects of speculation in hardware. The claim in the patent infringement is that the work on "Table-based Speculation.." was presented at Intel and attempts were made by the authors to negotiate a license for the technology. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some merit to this claim.
To be fair, I think universities should be granted patents, if only to look good on walls and recognize commitments. But they should be made publicly available if the university benefits from public funds. Especially in this case, where the idea seems novel, and non obvious.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It would take a whole lot more than reading that patent, and a whole lot more than reading Hennessey and Patterson, to know if Wisconsin had something it could collect on. That is to say, you'd have to know a detailed history of work in the field. That would mean being familiar with dozens of IEEE and ACM journal articles, something a patent examiner in Washington would never have time to do. That is to say, aggressive schemes for instruction parallelism is a huge body of work, and the patentability of the idea as a matter of fact is surely to be in dispute. The fact that Hennessey and Patterson attributes the idea to Wisconsin, Madison is a big piece of evidence, but not necessarily dispositive. Wisconsin has been a big player in this kind of work, and they (obviously) have graduates at Intel. In any case, the authors Hennessey and Patterson would be in a fairly select group of people who could offer authoritative comment. Then there is the question of whether the Intel design actually infringes. Finally, it's worth noting that many patent disputes likes this one are settled by cross-licensing. Without such practices, Intel, IBM, and AMD and who knows who else would probably be in court endlessly. Companies collect patents as a way of fending off lawsuits like this one. That tactic doesn't work, though, with organizations that don't make anything, in which respect, a university is disturbingly similar to a patent troll. That is to say, whether universities are good guys or not, they can have the same kind of disruptive effect as patent trolls, because they have no incentive not to sue, other than the cost of lawyers. The lawyers take the case on contingency fee and the lawyers are the patent trolls. The fact that the patent belongs to a university in the end means very little.