IMO, this takes away INTC's biggest stick for extracting pesky patent rights.
Michael, not sure I follow your reasoning. The exception allows INTC to withhold information (early chip specs, bus specs, new instructions, other relevant info to system builders, etc) from those potential customers who would allege that INTC is violating its (the system vendors) patents or other intellectual property.
INTC has no need to license (or cross licenses) patents to system vendors, in general. These are customers for its chips. In cases where the system vendor also has valuable IP, it simply cross licenses its patents with those of the system vendor.
OTOH, INTC strictly enforces its patent rights with other semiconductor vendors to prevent things like bus interfaces from being easily copied. AMD is a perfect example. It has no right to the PII bus. Therefore, the K7 will use something called the EV6 bus. It licensed this from Digital before Compaq bought it. This means the K7 will not be able to use INTC chipsets, so the infrastructure cost for K7 will be inherently higher than P2/3, mainly due to volumes. An interesting fact is that the EV6 bus is a higher performance bus than the P2 bus, but it will be inherently more expensive.
Gary |
