All: Latest on Intergraph/Intel feud....Just give me the PIIs!!!
Intergraph Wants Its Pentium IIs
(11/21/97; 1:00 p.m. EST)
By Alexander Wolfe, EE Times
Intergraph Thursday vowed that continued supplies of
Pentium II processors must be guaranteed for any
resolution of its acrimonious legal dispute with Intel.
"That would have to be part of the settlement," said Jim
Meadlock, chief executive officer at Intergraph. "We
have to make very sure we have a clear agreement that
Intel can't play games with." Intergraph will need
ever-greater quantities of the CPUs, as it gears up for a
major thrust to expand its share of the Windows NT
workstation market in 1998.
The two companies began their courtroom jostling,
earlier this week, when Intergraph filed suit in U.S.
District Court in Alabama charging Intel with patent
infringement and alleged anticompetitive practices. Intel
returned fire in a countersuit in U.S. District Court in
San Jose, Calif., seeking a declaratory judgment voiding
the Intergraph patents.
Interestingly, Intel was preparing to sue Intergraph first,
when the latter company beat it to the punch, according
to authoritative sources.
In the latest legal move, Intergraph said it will file a
motion that asks the San Jose court to throw out Intel's
declaratory-judgment request. It's not yet clear how the
judicial maneuvering will play out. However, according
to Meadlock: "I think there will be two weeks of legal
juggling, and when the dust settles, there will be one suit
in U.S. District Court in Alabama."
Both companies said they are not currently holding talks
aimed at reaching an out-of-court settlement. But
Meadlock said that he and Intel president Craig Barrett
have communicated twice via e-mail since the initial
suits were filed. And a source close to Intel who
requested anonymity said the company's "preference is
to settle without litigation."
At least one industry expert thinks the two companies
may be able to bridge their differences.
"It's possible they'll come to some reasonably quick
resolution," said Michael Slater, principal analyst at
MicroDesign Resources.
However, Slater noted that Intergraph may not have an
easy time ensuring it gets all the Pentium IIs it needs.
"It's not that Intel won't meet the letter of any
agreement they reach," Slater said. "It's a question of
how flexible Intel is going to be. What happens when
Intergraph asks for upside allocations? It seems like
making an enemy out of Intel is not a good strategy."
The meat of Intergraph's case against Intel are its
allegations that Intel played fast and loose with rights to
three Intergraph cache-management patents. Intergraph
was granted the patents during the development of its
1980s-vintage Clipper RISC microprocessor. It's not
clear which three patents are at issue; according to the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's database,
Intergraph holds seven cache-related patents. These
include patent 4,933,835, titled, "Apparatus for
maintaining consistency of a cache memory with a
primary memory"; patent 4,884,197, "Method and
apparatus for addressing a cache memory"; and
4,899,275, "Cache/MMU system."
"The patent [issue] is the core cause of our suit," said
Intergraph's Meadlock. "There is no doubt in our minds
that they wanted access to our patents for free."
Intel, for its part, is charging that Intergraph is seeking
to reap licensing revenues from a host of unnamed
computer-systems vendors.
"By suing Intergraph, we put ourselves on the line for a
large group of OEMs," said the Intel source who
requested anonymity.
"We have asserted our patent claims against any
company we think has been violating them," said Wade
Patterson, president of Intergraph Computer Systems,
the corporate arm responsible for Intergraph's NT
workstation business. "We are also in discussions with
some companies that have asserted their patents against
us first." Patterson declined to identify the companies.
"This kind of stuff is going on all over the industry,"
Patterson added. "We've had companies come to us and
say, 'You're violating such and such a patent.' And we
come back and say, 'Well, you're violating such and
such of ours.' In some cases, we've chosen to
offensively assert patent rights against companies; in
other cases we've done it defensively. In any case,
what we do with our patent claims is no business of
Intel's."
As the suits wend their way through the courts,
Intergraph believes it can continue to grow its
workstation business.
"We've done rather well with all the pressure Intel has
put on us," said Meadlock. "We'd have done a lot better
without this. I think we have as good a relationship with
Intel as we |
