Intel hit with $948.8 million VLSI infringement verdict VLSI Technology, a patent holding company affiliated with Softbank's Fortress Investment Group, has been awarded $948.8 million in a patent infringement claim against Intel Corporation. On Tuesday, a federal jury in the Western District of Texas, a popular venue for patent claims, found that Intel's Cascade Lake and Skylake …
Dunno, but following the behaviour or of another ARM scaling up partner (Apple).
ARM (as in technology) was founded at Acorn (as in BBC Micro manufacturer) Computers.
ARM Limited was the JV between Acorn, Apple and VLSI… well before Apple had to flog their share (with great irony) when John (Pepsi) Scully shat the bed @Cupertino when they almost went bankrupt.
US7606983B2 "Sequential ordering of transactions in digital systems with multiple requestors "
A digital system with an improved transaction ordering policy is disclosed. Individual occurrences of requests for access to common system resources specify whether or not the request is ordered. In some embodiments, the invention includes a memory that holds data, a controller, and at least two processors that generate requests to access the memory data. Each access request includes an indication of whether or not this request is to be performed in a sequential order among other access requests and, if so, an indication of the order. The controller receives the access requests from each processor, determines a performance order for the requests, and provides the access requests to the memory in the performance order. The performance order conforms to the specified order when the access requests so indicate.
I can't believe this is a patent that a court would uphold as being non-obvious,
Pick any device that has multiple cores and multiple or segmented memory -- that patent (in the description provided above) is vague enough to apply to them all. However, a further read of the patent adds additional details for the scheme used at ordering the processing of the data -- that seems to be where the argument lay for VLSI and Intel. (the idea that NPE's actually suffer harm, or the corrupting design of patent aggregators -- is a whole different issue that needs to be addressed)
How far we have come (fallen) from the original 17 year grant of exclusivity to the "inventor" to market his invention....
That's the thing. You can't use the summary to evaluate the patent. The summary is there to help people decide whether the patent might apply to some instance. You have to read the primary claims to see if there's anything not obvious to an ordinary practitioner (which is the standard).
That is a generalized summary of the patent, not the claimed scope of protection, which reads, for example, "a system for processing information, the system comprising: a memory configured to hold data; at least two processors, each configured to perform operations, and to generate an access request when one of the operations involves access to the data, wherein each access request includes an indication of whether or not this occurrence of the access request is to be performed in a sequential order among other occurrences of the access request and, if so, an indication of a specified order; and a controller configured to receive the access requests from each of the processors, to determine a performance order for the access requests, and to provide the access requests to the memory in the performance order, wherein the performance order conforms to the specified order when the access requests indicate the specified order."
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