Microprocessor giants settle with Patriot Scientific
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Patriot Scientific and TPL Group, co-holders of the Moore Microprocessor Patent Portfolio [MMPP], announced today that they have settled their suit for patent infringement with JVC, NEC Electronics, Panasonic, and Toshiba.The suit revolved around clocking technology used in most microprocessors since 1994 and attributed to Chuck Moore.The details of the settlement were not revealed, but the patent holders said the settlement includes the licensing of the technology to the defendants [above].After some initial wrangling between Patriot Scientific and TPL back in 2005, both companies joined forces to file suit against microprocessor companies using the technology. The list of companies using MMPP includes every major chip manufacturer in high tech and in consumer electronics."Patriot bought the IP and started looking at everybody?s chips and discovered, lo and behold, almost everybody is using this particular technology," said Nathan Brookwood, principal at Insight 64.Patriot is what is known in the industry as a patent troll, added Brookwood, mainly because it did not create the patent but rather bought the patent and then went out, trolling, to discover who might be in violation of it.Previously, Patriot and TLP settled with AMD, Intel, and Fujitsu among others.Few companies, if any, remain to settle with Patriot and TPL.In a far more significant suit among microprocessor giants, plaintiff AMD's suit for anti-competitive business practices against Intel is currently in the discovery stage with an agreed-upon trial date set for April, 2009.In discovery, the defendant must produce any and all information, including electronically created documents, such as emails, that the court considers relevant to the case.According to a news story in InfoWorld on March 12, 2007 Intel admitted that some "internal e-mails that may be important to the case were missing as a result of errors."Recent court rulings have not looked favorably on companies that cannot produce relevant e-mails.In Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, the judge instructed the jury that it was legitimate to presume that the information Warburg could not provide due to lost backup tapes and e-mails was probably damaging to the company's case. Zubulake was awarded $20 million.Started in 2005, the cast has been slowly dragging its way through the courts.As reported back then in InfoWorld, AMD accused Intel of monopolistic practices in the PC market by coercing customers to use its products rather than AMD's.Among the illegal practices cited by AMD against Intel were a variety of tactics to limit AMD's growth in the market by paying retailers and system OEMs not to sell or build systems with AMD chips.Earlier this year, the European Commission notified Intel that based on its monitoring of Intel?s business practices, the EC believes Intel was in violation of European Union monopoly law.If Intel loses the case, said Brookwood, it would of course have to cease the practices that AMD alleges are over the top for a company with the market share the size of Intel's.More damaging, however, could be the court dollar award if AMD is able to prove it has been economically damaged to the tune of X billions of dollars by Intel practices.AMD also claims that consumers have been damaged for billions of dollars over the past decade. If AMD wins, a class action lawsuit could also be in the offing.
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Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power everything from video game consoles to business computers.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. ,  the world's number two maker of microchips for personal  computers, has sealed a deal to supply China's second-largest  PC maker with chips, scoring its latest victory in a market  share battle with bigger rival Intel .
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The chipmaker appears to have met its most recent deadline for production of the smaller-featured chips.
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Intel Corp. has reached an agreement to hire hundreds of Hewlett-Packard Co. engineers who helped design the Itanium microprocessor, a massive joint project between the two technology companies since the early 1990s.
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A Scottish engineer has figured out how to tame microscopic wires, making it easier to build smaller microprocessors, which will eventually lead to smaller supercomputers.
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A tiny, fully functional, 70-megabit static random access memory computer chip crammed with more than 500 million transistors has been developed by researchers at Intel Corp.
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Blog: The graphics chipmaker has a new lineup of chips that can be plugged into servers or workstations to boost the performance of scientific computing applications.
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It's becoming clear that the low-power Silverthorne processor is more than a new chip. It is a building block for Intel's future road map.
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. - Everywhere you look at the Fall Processor Forum, there&#39;s another chip with more than one core. At this annual industry conference where chip companies discuss the designs they&#39;re working
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Computers built with Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor soon will be able to take advantage of the same power management technology the company has already built into its laptop and desktop microchips.
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In an announcement before semiconductor engineers in San Francisco this morning, AMD and IBM put forth proof of what could be their breakthrough process - their response to Intel in the race to reduction.  It could pull AMD back even with Intel by 2008, if Intel doesn't respond in the intervening months.
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Looking to get the most out of multi-core processors, a European-driven effort to build a framework for Java-based, real-time applications on modern multi-core chips and parallel processor systems is being announced Tuesday.Called the Java Environment for Parallel Real-time Development, or JEOPARD, the project is being underwritten by the European Commission (EC) to the tune of more than $4.9 million (3.3 million Euros), said The Open Group, which is participating in the project.The objective is to provide tools for platform-independent development of predictable systems that make use of symmetric multiprocessing multi-core platforms and field programmable gate array components, Open Group said. Tools plan would enhance software productivity and reusability by extending processor technology established on desktop systems for the needs of multi-core embedded systems."If you go out and buy a laptop or server, you get four-core processors or whatever. The way people program both applications and OSes hasn't really taken full advantage of the capabilities of these multi-core processors," said Dave Lounsbury, vice president for government services at The Open Group. "This is a hot topic. I think everybody recognizes there are some limitations right now," in making use of multi-core systems, he said.JEOPARD will research how to build APIs, OS extensions and language support for multi-core processors, with a special emphasis on embedded systems, Lounsbury said.The project will delve into extensions to handle different memory configurations. Situations will be considered in which there is not full symmetry, such as when a processor cannot access all parts of memory or chips are not using the same clock, said Lounsbury. These considerations are important because of constraints in memory bandwidth. Languages and operating systems can perform optimizations to address this."The idea here is that we'll see the creation of new sets of tools, whether it's extensions to OSes or new sets of compilers or languages like Java that will bring some of these new capabilities," Lounsbury said.While the project is based around Java, concepts from it could be made to work in other environments, he said. Asked when there might be results from JEOPARD, Lounsbury said the effort is a three-year EC program.Chip vendors could be expected to look closely at the project and incorporate results into their next generations of chips.Contributions from JEOPARD will be to be made to the RTSJ (Real-Time Specification for Java), which focuses on development of portable software in the multi-core embedded space, The Open Group said. Also, JEOPARD will feature development of a platform-independent software development interface for real-time multi-core systems based on RTSJ and Safety-Critical Java. RTSJ is the subject of Java Specification Requests 1 and 282 in the Java Community Process, while Safety-Critical Java is covered in JSR 302.Also participating in JEOPARD are the University of York, FZI, Vienna University of Technology, and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. Other participants include industrial manufacturers EADS, RadioLabs, and SkySoft and two embedded systems technology suppliers, aicas and Sysgo.In another effort pertaining to development for multi-core chips, RapidMind in November announced RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform v.30, which seeks to help developers build for these processors.
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The chip company makes a major deal to reach a new market.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. ,  the world's number two maker of microchips for personal  computers, will supply China's second-largest PC maker with  chips, scoring its latest victory in a market share battle with  bigger rival Intel .
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The company that years ago set out to become a legitimate alternative to Intel, and blazed the trail that AMD eventually followed, today announced it is setting aside its patent infringement claim against Intel. The companies have reached an out-of-court settlement granting Intel perpetual license to Transmeta's CPU power management technology, in exchange for $150 million in cash up front and $100 million more over the next five years.
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p&gt;Semiconductor design firm ARM (Quote, Chart) is took a major leap into the embedded microprocessor space by acquiring Artisan Components (Quote, Chart), producer of embedded memory, standard cell, input/output, analog and mixed-signal components.