AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#2Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#3Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
They can only do it if it was not publicly disclosed. You cannot patent something which has been kept a trade secret.
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#4At first glance this doesn't look like an exaggeration. It's basically a 1-to-1 rip off when you place the images side by side. Even the labels within the diagram are copied directly.
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#5Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
That's the way it should work, at least. But I have a nagging feeling that Intel wouldn't have done this so brazenly if (with the correct amount of lawyers and friendly judges) it wouldn't have seen a chance of the patent being upheld. Then again, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", so, who knows?!
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#6Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
They can only do it if it was not publicly disclosed. You cannot patent something which has been kept a trade secret.
I don’t understand what you mean. Does AMD’s public disclosure of the microarchitecture prevent them from filing prior art?
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#7Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
They can only do it if it was not publicly disclosed. You cannot patent something which has been kept a trade secret.
I think it's actually the opposite. In the US, the regulations changed several years ago from "First to Invent" (which is ambiguous) to "First to File" (which is pretty clear). In any event, I think you can only claim something as prior art if it's in the public domain. So, if you're very shady/greedy/lack an ethical backbone, and you get your hands on a private brief that isn't protected intellectual property, technically you can file that patent. I assume the owner could try to prove theft if they can determine how the IP was leaked and stolen intently.
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#8Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
They can only do it if it was not publicly disclosed. You cannot patent something which has been kept a trade secret.
Those AMD presentations are publicly available though. It looks like hot chips is a tech conference, and those AMD presentations were published as part of HC 28. I’ll follow up with a link if I can find one, but I think it’s pretty clear they are not in any way trade secrets.
Re: AMD Zen microarchitecture and Intel's Ocean Cove patent
#9Well... AMD can just cite their presentation as prior art, and it will be struck down. If anything, Intel was foolish to waste money on bored lawyers.
That's the way it should work, at least. But I have a nagging feeling that Intel wouldn't have done this so brazenly if (with the correct amount of lawyers and friendly judges) it wouldn't have seen a chance of the patent being upheld. Then again, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", so, who knows?!
Strictly speaking, only the claims matter, and so the text if those would need to be read and used to determine whether it can be invalidated due to prior art. The claims have very little to do with the diagrams supplied, rather they are about a way to compress cache coherency transfers if the line is all zeros (kind of like LPDDR has, in a way).
That said, copying so many of a competitors' slides into figures is still stupid as it is highly unlikely to give a judge a great first impression.