US University Trying To Ban Intel Core 2 Duo Chips!
One of the things that would benefit AMD a lot now would be a frozen Intel. I didn't see any Science-Fiction movie last night, because what I said may just happen, if Intel happens to have a lot of bad luck in the coming months. How's that? Well, the unexpected just happened, and Intel got sued for its Core 2 Duo chips ("patent infringement", of course), and the worst case scenario for the outcome of this deal is to see Intel stopping all Core 2 Duo sales, which is less likely to occur, than an off-court settlement...
This whole deal was started by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (shortly, WARF), which charged Intel Corporation with infringement of a patent that "significantly improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing". The disputed patent belongs to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and there are two ways to choose for Intel, in case they lose, but they'll probably pick the first one, if this happens. The largest semiconductors producer in the world has either to pay compensation, or stop selling Core 2 Duo-based processors.
The technology patented by the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes advanced prefetch mechanisms available in most processors today. The patent was issued back in 1998, and one of its hot parts goes like this:“A predictor circuit permits advanced execution of instructions depending for their data on previous instructions by predicting such dependencies based on previous mis-speculations detected at the final stages of processing. Synchronization of dependent instructions is provided by a table creating entries for each instance of potential dependency. Table entries are created and deleted dynamically to limit total memory requirements.”.
According to WARF, since 2001, they attempted in more situation to get to an agreement with Intel, with no results, while the guys at Intel claim they didn't violate any patents.
Well, we should wait and see what happens, because I am sure Intel can settle this matter off-court, if the process doesn't go in the right direction. After all, they agreed last year to pay Transmeta an initial $150 million fee, followed by five $20 million licensing fees, in the next five years, so how much can one university ask? 200, 300 millions?
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