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Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

bbc.com

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Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#5

Post by brownegg »

abluecloud wrote: post #2

$862m isn't that huge in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention, it's most likely not going to be $862m, my guess is it'll be less.

If it's $862m, last I checked, it will take them about 30 hours to bring in the necessary revenue--if they want to pay out of profits (I'm totally guessing here, what are real net margins on their hardware? 15-20%?), it'll take a couple days.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#6

Post by arbuge »

abluecloud wrote: post #2

$862m isn't that huge in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention, it's most likely not going to be $862m, my guess is it'll be less.

Given that large companies face large numbers of patent suits however, typically litigating several in parallel, spending all this money on just one could indeed be seen as distressing.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#8

Post by neikos »

trengrj wrote: post #4
ctz wrote: post #3

Patent in question: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5781752

"Table based data speculation" - so a lookup table?? Would be interested in knowing how innovative the patent is from someone with more knowledge in this field.

From what I read it is mostly branch predicition with data pre-loading on the CPU Level.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#9

Post by dyladan »

trengrj wrote: post #4
ctz wrote: post #3

Patent in question: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5781752

"Table based data speculation" - so a lookup table?? Would be interested in knowing how innovative the patent is from someone with more knowledge in this field.

It seems to me that the ILP is able to begin execution of branches before the branch is known to be true.

    def func():
        if predicate():
            task1()
        else:
            task2()
In the above program, the processor would be able to speculatively start execution of task1 before the predicate function returned a value.

(obviously the processor does this on a much lower level than this code)

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#10

Post by timthorn »

trengrj wrote: post #4
ctz wrote: post #3

Patent in question: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5781752

"Table based data speculation" - so a lookup table?? Would be interested in knowing how innovative the patent is from someone with more knowledge in this field.

Bear in mind the patent was filed in 1996 when considering the level of innovation.
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