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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 feel strangely compelled to say: "Captain, I protest! I am not a merry man!"
What has the Son of Mog done this time?
I have been slashdot conditioned to think that every patent suit is a patent troll trying to collect on obvious ideas from big companies. But from the background on the story, it would seem that this is not the case and that it has been on-going since 2001. That's a very long time to mess around before resorting to a law suit. How long does a patent last?
"For once, might the patent system actually be doing what it's supposed to?"
Clearly not, if these people had to fight Intel for 7 years and still haven't gotten a cent for licensing.
Whoever says that Klingons can't resolve things in a civilized manner are clearly wrong.
Well, I've noticed that when it's an educational institution, then it's not a troll. Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though. These rules are weird. I guess it all depends on your point of view.
Although, you should note that a couple decades ago, universities were not well funded so some senators passed a bill that would allow them to keep patents. Why not, they do the research? Today, universities are still building those portfolios. So the joke is kind of on the companies. If they were smart, they should have been dumping millions into universities in the form of donations to keep patents in the corporate sector.
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend. Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
My work here is dung.
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!
#DeleteChrome
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 always suspected modern computers were well beyond the ability of human invention.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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
How much is returned to the public? WARF has put almost $1 billion back into research at the University ($50 million last year) and supported 1500 seperate research projects last year. Not to mention that there are 1000's of people employeed around the state in the private sector at small biotech companies and other firms developing products off of WARF licensed technologies.
ÕÕ
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.
With every due respect this shouldn't be 'funny'. This is a geek site, and we have standards to uphold: *Worf* is the son of *Mogh*.
So you mean that patents are working?
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued. That's just about the craziest reasoning I've seen on slashdot.
But more to your original point, the idea of patents is to prevent "parasitic maggots" that capitalize, copy, and lazily "innovate" using someone else's effort. So, rather than the patent being parasitic, the system that you advocate for actually promotes and fosters laziness all the while minimizing the reward to the originator.
And, there is no system of patents that guarantees payment in perpetuity. Once you consider the fact that it takes years to get through the patent office, in many fields the lifetime of a patent is relatively short in business terms. **
Now, I'm not going to defend EVERY patent out there. Hell, I've seen my fair share that are incomprehensible and/or entirely obvious (both in the legal and technical sense). This does not seem to be the case here--at least not yet.
I'll probably get modded down as a troll and blow what karma I do have since you voice a very popular opinion. But, I'll do it anyway.
[** Copyright, on the other hand, does come much closer. When you're discussing about protecting anything at the "author's life+" then you're talking about a long time relative to any particular individual.]