The chain of lawsuits in the confrontation between Intel and VIA seems to be endless. Yesterday we learned that Intel brought one more lawsuit against VIA. This time the company sues VIA and Centaur Technology division (Samuel developers). The lawsuit is brought to the Court of Texas, USA and accuses VIA of 5 patents infringements when they developed their C3 CPU. So, now the whole thing looks as follows:

• At first Intel claimed that VIA P4X266 chipset infringed on 5 Intel’s patents (see this news story).
• In return, VIA sued Intel for the infringement on one of the patents, which VIA acquired together with the purchase of Centaur Company (see this news story).
• After that Intel brought a number of lawsuits regarding VIA P4X266 chipset and C3 CPU in Germany, Great Britain and Hong Kong (see this news story).
• And now Intel accuses VIA of patent infringement during C3 processor development in the USA (in the same state where VIA submitted its lawsuit to court, actually). By the way, the curious thing about this lawsuit is that it didn’t take much air. It was brought to court on October 5, but we learned about it only yesterday, after we read a story on CNET. It looks as if the public is no longer that vitally interested in this confrontation.

Well, the number of lawsuits keeps growing and the whole story now looks more and more puzzling. No doubt that the court thing will last really long before everything will be made clear. Of course, things may take a different turn if both companies make up their mind to solve the matter peacefully and not to waste time on court matters.