Intel, Dell, Accused of Patent Infringement for Hyper-Threading, SSE

by Anton Shilov
03/29/2004 | 04:09 AM

A company that once promised to deliver a chip that is times faster than Pentium but failed is now trying to sue Intel Corporation and Dell over patent infringement by implementing the Hyper-Threading as well as some other multimedia instructions into chips and using such chips.

The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Marshall, Texas, by MicroUnity Systems Engineering, which was founded in 1988 by John Moussouris, a physicist and computer designer, who co-founded MIPS Technologies in the past, News.com quotes The New York Times.

Originally MicroUnity intended to create a processor to handle multimedia data and even built a special semiconductor fab to make them in the mid-nineties. No plans of MicroUnity materialized and the company was forced to sell the foundry and license its technologies to some other chip developers to survive. Right now the firm is dealing with processors for broadband consumer devices, such as cable-modems.

Now Santa Clara, California-based MicroUnity claims that Intel infringes its patents by using certain technologies developed by the complaint “a decade ago”. Particularly, they accuse Intel of illegally implementing the Hyper-Threading and “multimedia-processing features” found in the Pentium III and the Pentium 4 processors, presumably SSE. Dell is accused of taking advantage of those technologies in its PCs.

The lawsuit is being brought by the same legal team that sued Intel on behalf of Intergraph, a developer of microprocessors in Huntsville, Alabama. Intel has paid Intergraph $150 million in that lawsuit.

Intel and Dell officials did not comment on the story.