Patent troll going after AMD for infringement
"Those who can, do; those who can't, sue." Although the original version of this phrase is (unfairly) used to describe teachers, we think that it does a nice job summing up the current state of the consumer electronics industry as well; it seems that nary a week goes by these days without some "intellectual property firm" crying patent infringement against a company that actually makes something, and this time around it's silicon powerhouse AMD being taken to the mat by lawsuit-happy Opti Inc. According to Reg Hardware, do-nothing Opti is suing AMD for violating three of its patents covering "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses," and is hoping that a jury will decide to ban the sale of those chips which supposedly employ this arcane technology. As a bit of background, Opti started out as a chip developer itself before selling most of its assets to another company called Opti Technologies (no relation); after the sale, Opti Inc. was de-listed from NASDAQ due to a business plan that hinged on "pursuing license revenues from companies we believe are infringing Opti's patents." While it's tempting to dismiss this suit as yet another baseless gold-digging scheme, Opti -- like NTP -- does have a history of prying cash away from big ballers in the industry: in late 2004, the company accused NVIDIA of violating these same patents, and was able to wrest somewhere around $7 million from the graphics powerhouse. Sadly, with Transmeta suing Intel, SGI suing ATI, and now Opti targeting AMD, it looks like most of the PCs we buy next year will be labeled Via Inside.
Read- Opti vs. AMD
Read- Opti vs. NVIDIA
