Opti announced it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit on Friday against
AMD over three patents under the umbrella name of “Predictive Snooping of
Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.”
In a release, Opti said AMD infringes the patents
by making, selling, and offering for sale CPUs and core logic products based
on and incorporating Predictive Snooping technology and inducing and
contributing to the infringement of the patents by others.
The suit was filed the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Texas.
An AMD spokesperson said the company had not seen the suit and had no
comment at this time.
But Bernard Marren, president & CEO of Opti, said the company first
approached AMD four years ago.
“Back then, they were only using [the technology] in their chipsets, not
in big volume,” Marren told internetnews.com. “This is a more serious
case because it’s across the board,” he said, referring to AMD’s Opteron processors.
Mountain View, Calif.–based Opti is mainly focused on licensing patents
it attained during its years as a chipset designer, which it stopped doing
about five years ago.
According to Merran, Opti settled a similar case,
involving the same patents, with nVidia in August for $11 million and a royalty fee of $750,000 per quarter starting next year. He also said Opti struck a cross-licensing deal with Intel
years ago that netted the firm $13.5 million and protects Intel from being sued in this matter.
The Intel settlement followed Opti’s failed attempt to get a license to Intel’s Pentium III and IV processors, which, according to Merran, led to the company leaving the chipset design business.
An Intel spokesman said the company had no comment Opti’s patent claims.
The three patents at issue in the lawsuit against AMD are U.S. Patent No.
5,710,906, U.S. Patent No. 5,813,036 and U.S. Patent No. 6,405,291, all
entitled “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.”
