Intel in trouble with Intergraph, might have to pay $150M, and more...

[Sunner]

Extremetech article
The first few lines:

A U.S. district court ruled that Intel Corp.'s Itanium processor infringes the intellectual property of Intergraph Corp., and ordered Intel to pay $150 million in damages.

Moreover, the judge ruled that Intergraph can ask for an injunction blocking sales of the Itanium or Itanium 2 processors. The court ruled that Intel "directly infringes" patents held on Intergraph's "parallel instruction computing" (PIC) technology used in Intel's Itanium family of 64-bit processors.

That's not too good for Intel, if it does indeed go through.

Anyone know anything about this, I wasn't even aware of this lawsuit?

Oh and there's an article over at The Register as well.

 

[First]

Intel already owes $300M to Intergraph even before today (the $300M was from a previous ruling earlier this year). Today's ruling adds even more, another $150M, which brings the total to $450M, or nearly half a billion bucks once litigation fees are taken into account (after all this has been going on for close to six years). Not too pretty.

EDIT: And in addition, according to The EE Times, upon payment of $150 million, Intel then has three options: pay an additional $100 million to Intergraph and receive a license to the PIC patents; appeal the district court decision and, if they lose the appeal, pay Intergraph an additional $100 million; or try to design around the infringement.

 

[kranky]

I know some peeps who work for Intergraph so I've been hearing about this case for a long time. There was a time when Intergraph was hoping to get a billion dollars in a settlement, and while they probably won't get that much, a half a billion ain't too shabby.

From what I've been told, Intergraph's case was very strong from the start, and Intel's strategy was to drag their feet and delay as long as possible, hoping that the mounting legal fees would get Intergraph to accept a small settlement. That obviously didn't happen.