Duke, Re: "VIA's claim to the license is through Cyrex (?)."
Actually, VIA's claim to a Pentium 4 bus license is through S3, not Cyrix. Here's more information about the subject, though a few of the details are wrong. Paul Engle knows the whole story, and if he ever stops by again, he may share it.
extremetech.com
"To understand what's probably shaping VIA's strategy, we have to take a trip down memory lane. Once upon a time, there was a company called Exponential Research. Although the focus was a little different, Exponential was the "Transmeta" of its day. Exponential garnered substantial venture capital and was the darling of the technology press. Instead of low-power CPUs, though, Exponential's initial focus was on building very high clock rate (at the time), Intel-compatible CPUs using bipolar technology. The company burned through a lot of cash before going belly-up. What Exponential had going for it was a stable of patents key to developing high clock rate CPUs.
As the company was being folded, a bidding war took place for Exponential's intellectual property. One of the bidders was Intel. However, Intel lost out to S3, who was still flying high in the graphics business at the time. S3 then turned around and cut a cross-licensing deal with Intel, which would allow it to enter the core logic market. S3 was probably too ambitious for its own good. It merged with Diamond Multimedia, but the combined company eventually left the graphics business, selling the remains off to a joint venture. The joint venture partner was none other than VIA.
So it's no stretch of the imagination to believe that VIA's strategy is to leverage the S3 cross-licensing agreement with Intel. However, given the convoluted nature of the various deals, it's by no means certain that courts will allow VIA to be sheltered under the umbrella of S3's old cross-licensing agreement with Intel. At the very least, the legal teams for both companies may be sparring with each other for years to come."
wanna_bmw |
