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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chipguy who wrote (242162)	10/9/2007 3:08:55 PM
From: graphicsguru	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Chipguy, your example of a slight twist in a CMOS inverter sounds a whole lot more defensible than the SGI patent. Evidently, it had some value, and was different from what people did previously -- so it wasn't completely obvious. The SGI patent is rather different. I know ATI regularly goes and speaks to customers and asks them what they want. And I would be very surprised if ATI can't find some documents from customers asking for exactly the features in the SGI patent (pre application). Most likely, they also have design documents that also pre-date the patent, where they've evaluated the cost-benefit of going to fp, and decided that it's still n years away. They certainly have long-term roadmap documents that show fp in their future plans -- some of these likely pre-date the application. There's also an excellent chance that a thorough search will turn up an obscure piece of research graphics hardware using fp. I'm well aware that "massive originality" is not a requirement for patents, but "non-obviousness" is. And the SGI patent fails in this regard. Whether or not a court will agree is a bit of a crapshoot, but I'd bet on ATI prevailing. So I have three reasons for believing this is not terribly significant: my own judgement about non-obviousness, my own judgement about prior art, and the fact that ATI did an evaluation, and decided to litigate. By the way, I hold over ten patents with more pending, so I do know a thing or two about them.