AMD is patent lawyers new target!
There are many ways to make money today. Not just by sale of goods or hard work like in the 'ole days. Nope. Now there are many ways to make a buck. For instance there is money to be made in buying debts! Then there are co's that make a ton of money from just suing. Its not a new money racket but it is getting worse. Remember Rambus Inc. and their infamous patent lawsuits. The concept is catching on unfortunatly.......Like this amd suit. Opti Inc. company also sued Nvidia for patent infingment. Microunity sued Intel. They got the money so this just boldened them. They found a great market here. Patent ideas that you wont or plan to really use, just to sue others that DO make use of "similar" technology even if they thought of it aswell. Its like there is some new field of "patent think tanks"if you will where corps just sit on patents to later use for suits. Never actually intending to use the technologies simply own the concept.
[ The Opti lawsuit ]
AMD sued over predictive snooping
"A FIRM is suing AMD alleging three of its patents have been breached.
Opti Inc sued AMD in a Texas district court over US patent 5,710,906; 5,813,036; and 6,405,291.
These all bear the legend "Predictive snooping of cache memory for master initiated accesses".
The firm has already sued Nvidia over the same patents. That case ended on the 11th of August
2006 with both parties coming to some sort of agreement and the judge dismissing the case
with prejudice.
Opti reckons AMD breached the patents by manufacturing and selling both CPUs and core logic
products using predictive snooping technology. Opti wants redress. µ
* DETAILS of the redress it got from Nvidia are here. A $10,000,000 payment followed by more quarterly
payments starting in 2007. "
AMD Sued for Patent Infringement
"Opti, a Mountain View, Calif. company, has sued Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for using its patented
"predictive snooping" in its processors without permission. Snooping technology involves the transfer of
data from a PCI bus to a PCI controller. "....AMD infringes the patents by making, selling and offering for
sale CPUs and core logic products based on and incorporating Predictive Snooping technology and inducing
and contributing to the infringement of the patents by others," alleges Opti. AMD said it had not seen the
lawsuit and would not comment."
[ Microunity lawsuit ]
AMD sued by Microunity over CPU patents
from Intel.
The case was filed on the 21st of November in a Texas district court.
Microunity alleges AMD breached the 5,742,840 it holds for a "general purpose, multiple precision parallel
operation programmable media processor" iby using it in the Athlon, Sempr0n Athlon 64 X2, Turion, Next gen
Opteron, quad core Opteron, Barcelona and Geode NX microprocessors.
Other patents AMD is alleged to
have breached include the 5,794,060; the 5,794,071; the 5,809,321; the 6,006,318; the 6,584,482 B1;
the 6,643,765 B1; the 6,725,356 B2; the 5,630,096; the 5,737,547; the 5,812,799 and the 5,822,603 filings.
Microunity wants a trial and an injunction, its lawyers fees, and enhanced damages. µ
See Also
The allegations PDF format
Microunity sues Dell, Intel over hyperthreading, multimedia instructions
Intel says it will fight Microunity tooth and nail
Sony sued by Microunity "
Amd has been sued in the past however 1999 amd sued over patent _theregister.co.uk
No one really knows wether these rumours are true or not, but one thing is for sure. Its going to make AMD stock holders nervous in the meantime.
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