US ITC ban on Nvidia patent infringement products

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Fox5

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
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What was nvidia infringing on that AMD, Intel, and just about everyone else do not?
 

akugami

Diamond Member
Feb 14, 2005
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What was nvidia infringing on that AMD, Intel, and just about everyone else do not?

AMD uses pretty much the same types of RAM that nVidia does. RAMBUS is just biding its time.
 

akugami

Diamond Member
Feb 14, 2005
5,681
1,876
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Except they pay the royalties due to prior agreement with rambus. Nvidia chose not to pay or settle thus litigation

Didn't realize that. If AMD is already paying royalties then they've already paid up. I do know that sometimes a company who is suing another for patent infringement will wait to sue yet more companies down the line.
 

railven

Diamond Member
Mar 25, 2010
6,604
561
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Didn't realize that. If AMD is already paying royalties then they've already paid up. I do know that sometimes a company who is suing another for patent infringement will wait to sue yet more companies down the line.

Someone posted the AMD news here, can't remember the exact numbers but $100 million over 5-7 years come to mind.


Reading up on the RAMBUS thing it really seems like others tried to steal their work. They knew RAMBUS were on the fringe of something big and tried to coax them to join JEDEC so they'd have to share their patents. But RAMBUS out smarted them and kept their patents.

The article about the FTC is bias since that is the article of the FTC's case which they were trying to prove - yet it was dismissed and further actions by the FTC were denied.

Funny how RAMBUS has been winning all its litigation fairly, even blowing the door open the DRAM fixing - yet they're the bad guys. Haha this forum is weird man.
 

bryanW1995

Lifer
May 22, 2007
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the real problem with rambus is that they came out with all this cool technology but did nothing with it. they just wait for somebody to copy it so they can sue them. If they would just get bought out by sony, samsung, intel, ibm, etc like any honest, respectable patent-squatter then they would certainly be viewed much more favorably.
 

taserbro

Senior member
Jun 3, 2010
216
0
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Someone posted the AMD news here, can't remember the exact numbers but $100 million over 5-7 years come to mind.


Reading up on the RAMBUS thing it really seems like others tried to steal their work. They knew RAMBUS were on the fringe of something big and tried to coax them to join JEDEC so they'd have to share their patents. But RAMBUS out smarted them and kept their patents.

The article about the FTC is bias since that is the article of the FTC's case which they were trying to prove - yet it was dismissed and further actions by the FTC were denied.

Funny how RAMBUS has been winning all its litigation fairly, even blowing the door open the DRAM fixing - yet they're the bad guys. Haha this forum is weird man.

That's their version of the story.
What I heard long before this whole deal became huge is that ddr makers basically colluded rambus out of the memory business but rambus counter-screwed everybody with a flurry of submarine patents on ddr technology. Even the uspto had ruled that what rambus did was clearly anticipation at some point. Believe who you want to believe but the truth is neither side is completely innocent in this deal and the immediate situation is that right now, rambus is at everybody's doors asking us all to bend over.

While it's all fine and dandy to just shake our heads and commiserate on how wrong the patenting system has become, the fact remains that the customers will end up paying for the mess and trying to paint it black and white is really not helping anyone decipher the situation.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,672
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the real problem with rambus is that they came out with all this cool technology but did nothing with it. they just wait for somebody to copy it so they can sue them. If they would just get bought out by sony, samsung, intel, ibm, etc like any honest, respectable patent-squatter then they would certainly be viewed much more favorably.

RAMBUS, Inc. has produced designs and outsourced production on chips before. Sadly, the technology they produce in-house is never as good as (or as current as) JEDEC standards of the day. RDRAM had a brief moment of glory as the memory-of-choice for Pentium 4s until dual-channel DDR400 permanently unseated it, but it was terrible on Pentium III platforms, and it was never updated fast enough to keep up with advancing JEDEC memory standards.

For all the technology thievery that allegedly took place in and around JEDEC, it seems amusing that JEDEC standards advance so much more quickly than RAMBUS, Inc.'s own designs.

Last time I checked, RAMBUS managed to get their XDR into the PS3. That was their last major design win, unless they managed to get XDR into some other device(s).
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,118
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I know it is nowhere near the same thing but whenever I think or hear of the stuff Rambus pulled with Jedec my mind always conjures up the silliness of SCO.