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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Saturn V who wrote (96960)	1/20/2000 6:56:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Ah yes, Patents. The Speed Step gets you 95 percent of the way. If I were a patent lawyer, I would argue that the last five percent was an "obvious" extension. "Obvious" is very subjective, and "obvious" means obvious to anyone skilled in the art. I can't make a statement as a hardware engineer since I'm not one, but as a software engineer it would appear that Intel has devised a way to lower the clock speed automatically based on the power supply type and Transmeta is doing it based on processor usage. These are two completely different applications, so unless Intel patented a wider range of applications than what they're currently implementing they may be out of luck. OTHO, it could be that both have patented the methods for slowing the clock and if so then the patents could either conflict or not, depending on how closely related the methods are. Am I making sense or just jabbering?