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OCAU News |
VIA and Intel make peace (kinda)
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Tuesday, 8-April-2003 09:39:58 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Just got a press-release from VIA - the meat of it is below:
Taipei, Taiwan, 8 April 2003 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced that VIA and Intel Corporation have reached a settlement agreement in a series of pending patent lawsuits related to chipsets and microprocessors. The agreement encompasses 11 pending cases in five countries involving 27 patents.
Under terms of the settlement, both companies will dismiss all pending legal claims in all jurisdictions. The companies also entered into a ten-year patent cross license agreement covering each company’s products. As part of the agreement Intel granted VIA a license to sell microprocessors that are compatible with the x86 instruction set but not pin compatible or bus compatible with Intel microprocessors.
Intel further agreed for a period of three years, not to assert its patents on VIA bus or pin compatible microprocessors. Intel also granted VIA a four year license to design and sell chipsets that are compatible with the Intel microprocessor bus and agreed not to assert its patents on VIA or its customers or distributors on such chipsets for a fifth year. The agreement will be royalty bearing to Intel for some products. The license agreements do not apply to S3 Graphics, a company partially owned by VIA.
Interesting. The full document is here. This seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers. Does it mean in 3 years time we'll see VIA branching out with their own socket, similar to how AMD is competing with Intel? Or will VIA partner with AMD and start producing socketA CPUs? Perhaps this simply marks the first step in a gradual reconciliation between VIA and Intel that will ultimately let VIA continue to use Intel socket and bus standards (as their C3 does, using socket370). Similar questions apply to their motherboard chipsets supporting Intel's CPUs. On that note, is SiS licensed to use these technologies? Or will they be the next legal target? Time will tell..
Update: More info here, here and here.
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