Opti Files Suit Against AMD?

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3644786
Opti announced it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit on Friday against AMD over three patents under the umbrella name of "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses."

In a release, Opti said AMD (Quote) infringes the patents by making, selling, and offering for sale CPUs and core logic products based on and incorporating Predictive Snooping technology and inducing and contributing to the infringement of the patents by others.

The suit was filed the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

An AMD spokesperson said the company had not seen the suit and had no comment at this time.

But Bernard Marren, president & CEO of Opti, said the company first approached AMD four years ago.

"Back then, they were only using [the technology] in their chipsets, not in big volume," Marren told internetnews.com. "This is a more serious case because it's across the board," he said, referring to AMD's Opteron processors.

Mountain View, Calif.–based Opti is mainly focused on licensing patents it attained during its years as a chipset designer, which it stopped doing about five years ago.

According to Merran, Opti settled a similar case, involving the same patents, with nVidia (Quote) in August for $11 million and a royalty fee of $750,000 per quarter starting next year. He also said Opti struck a cross-licensing deal with Intel (Quote) years ago that netted the firm $13.5 million and protects Intel from being sued in this matter.

In 2002, OPTi sold its semiconductor business to OPTi Technologies. At that time, Marren said that OPTi would turn its attention to protecting and enforcing its intellectual property rights.

But Bernard Marren, president & CEO of Opti, said the company first approached AMD four years ago.
"Back then, they were only using [the technology] in their chipsets, not in big volume," Marren told internetnews.com. "This is a more serious case because it's across the board," he said, referring to AMD's Opteron processors.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3644786
Opti announced it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit on Friday against AMD over three patents under the umbrella name of "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses."

In a release, Opti said AMD (Quote) infringes the patents by making, selling, and offering for sale CPUs and core logic products based on and incorporating Predictive Snooping technology and inducing and contributing to the infringement of the patents by others.

The suit was filed the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

An AMD spokesperson said the company had not seen the suit and had no comment at this time.

But Bernard Marren, president & CEO of Opti, said the company first approached AMD four years ago.

"Back then, they were only using [the technology] in their chipsets, not in big volume," Marren told internetnews.com. "This is a more serious case because it's across the board," he said, referring to AMD's Opteron processors.

Mountain View, Calif.–based Opti is mainly focused on licensing patents it attained during its years as a chipset designer, which it stopped doing about five years ago.

According to Merran, Opti settled a similar case, involving the same patents, with nVidia (Quote) in August for $11 million and a royalty fee of $750,000 per quarter starting next year. He also said Opti struck a cross-licensing deal with Intel (Quote) years ago that netted the firm $13.5 million and protects Intel from being sued in this matter.

I'd thought as much. It seemed to me to be an oppertunistic case in all senses of the term.
By the way, "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses" is an incredibly long name for what technology?

Abstract

When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes. The controller then allows the burst access to take place between secondary memory and the PCI-bus master, and simultaneously and predictively, performs an inquire cycle of the L1 cache for the next cache line. In this manner, if the PCI burst continues past the cache line boundary, the new inquire cycle will already have taken place, or will already be in progress, thereby allowing the burst to proceed with, at most, a short delay. Predictive snoop cycles are not performed if the first transfer of a PCI-bus master access would be the last transfer before a cache line boundary is reached.

So basically this technology is integral to AMD's method of building CPU's if I am at all correct? The patent language seems quite convoluted to say the least. Or is it a secondary method for accessing the PCI bus? :?