by Anna Filatova
11/27/2001 | 02:49 PM
No, there is no need to worry. It is, of course, not about the famous "disgraced" VIA chipsets for Pentium 4 CPU. The court machine never works so fast when it has to do with cases of this importance. To tell the truth, this story is exactly about how long it usually takes the court to finish at least one case. Today the Chinese "Commercial Times" newspaper reported that the court dismissed the case of Intel against VIA dealing with ... VIA Athlon chipsets.
Frankly speaking, we couldn’t recall at first what the whole thing is about, because the mere combination of Intel patents and AMD processors sounds simply absurd. However, when we strained our brain it suddenly occurred to us what they meant. Long time ago (namely in early 2000) VIA announced its first KX133 chipset for Slot A AMD Athlon CPUs (this chipset lasted for about half a year and then got replaced with the KT133). However, Intel accused VIA of some patents infringement. Which patents these were doesn’t matter any more as the court still managed to decide something even after a two-year period. They announced that VIA didn’t violate any patents. And now that you know about it just try to imagine how long it may take the court to settle the recent lawsuits between VIA and Intel on Pentium 4 chipsets. Yeah, the court machine seems to be the fastest thing in the world, no doubt :-)