Intel faces coughing up to Intergraph again

The Inquirer ^ | 07-04-2002 | Paul Hales

[JameRetief]

Intel faces coughing up to Intergraph again

On-going Itanic courtcase could cost Intel $250mil

By Paul Hales: Thursday 04 July 2002, 09:43

CHIPMAKER INTERGRAPH must be miffed with Intel -- or grateful. Chipzilla paid Intergraph $300 million earlier this year after the five years of legal wranglings in a courtcase that charged that Intel had infringed Intergraph's patents in the design of the Pentium processor.

Now, a district court judge in Texas is to decide whether Intel has again infringed Intergraph's patents again, this time on the Itanium processor. And, Intergraph says Intel has already agreed to pay Intergraph $150 million if it loses at the District Court level and an additional $100 million if it attempts to appeal and loses again.

This deal was struck back in April. According to Intergraph chairman and CEO Jim Taylor, the settlement "establishes a current value for the parallel instruction computing (PIC) patents at issue in the Texas suit. If we succeed in that case, the liquidated damages will enable us to realize the value of the PIC patents immediately, rather than having to rely upon the commercial viability of future Intel products in years to come.”

The suit was filed on July 30, last year, and charges Intel with infringing two Intergraph patents "that define key aspects of parallel instruction computing". Intergraph says it developed the technology in 1992 when its Advanced Processor Division was designing Intergraph’s next generation C5 Clipper microprocessor.

Intergraph’s says its patented technology is an essential component of Intel’s IA-64 EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) architecture, which "is at the heart of Intel’s new Itanium chip".

Here's Intel's statement.

here's Intergraph's.

Intel is set to launch Itanium 2 on Monday. µ

See Also:

Itanium II benchmarked against other CPUs

AMD, Sun set to bash the Itanic

[dr_who]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?ar ticle=4225

[dr_who]

Interesting, unrelated link from what appears to be the Paul Erlich of the Internet (assuming he's anyone of note at all):

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pu lpit/pulpit20020627.html

[ContentiousObjector]

So how much of intergraphs revenue comes from sueing Intel these days?

[IVote2]

So how much of intergraphs revenue comes from sueing Intel these days?

The better questiion is, how much did Intel cost Intergraph in revenue. I hope Intel will pay, however I believe the last settlement included an agreement as to limits for this one, should it have to be paid.