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SGI Sues ATI?

I'm having trouble figuring out how one can patent FPU's (which have been around forever) and the math (floating point operations) that can be calculated on them.

I mean, the flops that are calculated on a gpu, could, concievably, be calculated on the FPU of a modern CPU, though obviously at an incredible cost of performance.

The patent, apparently, is of math.

Can I go patent basic geometry calculations, and sue text book publishers for disseminating the information without my consent? Or how about the students that are figuring out the hypotenuse of a given triangle?

/edit: to top it off, didnt ati buy artx and it's patents/designs etc? What was left of artx became SGI...
WTF?
 
Heh, trying to halt sale of Radeon processors, eh? With R600 around the bend, eh? Rather convenient, wouldn't you think?

It always amazes me how long it takes patent holders to defend the patent.
 
eno-on said:
I'm having trouble figuring out how one can patent FPU's (which have been around forever) and the math (floating point operations) that can be calculated on them.

I mean, the flops that are calculated on a gpu, could, concievably, be calculated on the FPU of a modern CPU, though obviously at an incredible cost of performance.

The patent, apparently, is of math.

Can I go patent basic geometry calculations, and sue text book publishers for disseminating the information without my consent? Or how about the students that are figuring out the hypotenuse of a given triangle?

/edit: to top it off, didnt ati buy artx and it's patents/designs etc? What was left of artx became SGI...
WTF?
Click to expand...
From what I remember of my 4th year Engineering Law course, there's 3 requirements for patentability.
1) Is it new? Nothing else like it?
2) Is it inventive? Something that nobody else would have thought of?
3) Is it useful? Or is it industrially applicable?

Also, geometry has been around way longer than a patent can protect, and it's been published already (most important part), so no you can't patent geometry. :p
 
Yes you can patent geometry calculations, or moreso - the mathematical representation in silicon that would produce it electronically.

If you find a better way to calculate anything mathematically you can patent it, there are *many* mathematical loseless compression techniques that are patented.

If patent laws were around a few thousand years ago, you could be sure that the person who invented addition would have patented it and got a royalty on it.

There was a big spat about who owned the word "it" Coca-cola or Ebay. Technically we are all trademark infringing whenever we use the word... Reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Not that I think its right all the time, sometimes its just silly.
 
Fair enough, but again, modern CPUS have FPU's. It'c concievable that we could program the same math to be done on them. So whos infringing? The CPU makers, or the software writers?
 
RickyJ said:
Heh, trying to halt sale of Radeon processors, eh? With R600 around the bend, eh? Rather convenient, wouldn't you think?

It always amazes me how long it takes patent holders to defend the patent.
Click to expand...

R600? What is this, the first time someone's introduced a new GPU? Come on, if you're going to suggest things of this nature, it seems natural to assume that they're acting now because of the recent...trying to remember...oh yeah, merger with AMD.

R600 is just a little bonus motivation to get this settled faster (and seriously, anyone who sued ATI would wait until a refresh) - now that ATI is owned by a larger corporation with more capital and more at stake, those 'unspecified monetary damages' have a lot more elbow room.
 
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