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Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case
- abluecloud 11y ago$862m isn't that huge in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention, it's most likely not going to be $862m, my guess is it'll be less.
- brownegg 11y agoIf it's $862m, last I checked, it will take them about 30 hours to bring in the necessary revenue--if they want to pay out of profits (I'm totally guessing here, what are real net margins on their hardware? 15-20%?), it'll take a couple days.
- bshimmin 11y agoMan, that's such a humbling stat. Many of us here don't even earn that in a year!
- chucknelson 11y ago$862 million? > Man, that's such a humbling stat. Many of us here don't even earn that in a lifetime! FTFY Unless I missed the /s ;)
- delecti 11y agoEven more exaggerated than that. Many families don't earn that across several generations. That's about 17,000 years at $50,000/year. At 40 years of working life, you'd need over 400 people.
- beeboop 11y agoThe combined income earned by anyone in the entirety of history who is the least bit related to me, adjusted for PPP, probably does not equal $800MM+.
- Dylan16807 11y agoIs this a weird meta-joke where you pretend to miss the joke?
- TwiztidK 11y agoWe're also talking about one of the largest companies in the world, so it's really not that shocking.
- Kristine1975 11y agoAnd Apple saves a lot of money by not paying taxes /s
- SG- 11y agoOh it's just Apple?
- Kristine1975 11y agoNo of course not. There's also Facebook, Amazon etc. etc. etc. But the article is about Apple.
- wang_li 11y agoDon't forget UWisc!
- desireco42 11y agothis is the best! I certainly don't make this much in a year.
- maxerickson 11y agoIt would take ~8 days of net income (they declared $10 billion of net income in the most recently reported quarter).
- arbuge 11y agoGiven that large companies face large numbers of patent suits however, typically litigating several in parallel, spending all this money on just one could indeed be seen as distressing.
- rwmj 11y agoIf it keeps smaller companies out of the market because they are not able to join patent cross-licensing cartels, then it may be a price worth paying.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- simonh 11y agoIt's more than double what Apple paid for P.A. Semi and Intrinsity put together, the fabless semiconductor design firms that are the foundation of Apple's processor engineering capabilities.
- rayiner 11y agoThat's really more an indictment of how little PASemi and Intrinsity sold for (in a world where WhatsApp sells for $20 billion).
- simonh 11y agoI take your point, but if I were to pick any of those valuations as being adrift from reality it wouldn't be those for P.A. Semi or Intrinsity.
- rayiner 11y agoAs you said: P.A. Semi and Intrinsity are "the foundation of Apple's processor engineering capabilities." That might have been their market value, but I think it's fair to say that the value to Apple was far greater (i.e. Apple got a huge purchaser's surplus in the deal).
- simonh 11y agoYup, no argument there. They've converted that talent into a significant advantage for their platforms.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago>$862m isn't that huge in the grand scheme of things. Well, it normalizes large patent payment damages which isn't good and guarantees that non-giant companies will never, ever be able to compete in this space because investors are spooked over random near $1b lawsuits. Big companies seem to not mind the patent status quo for some reason. I suspect it just keeps competition away by raising the barrier to entry. This should be concerning to all. The refrain of "Apple can afford it" is scary as Apple is the world's wealthiest company. Of course they can afford it. That's besides the point.
- ctz 11y agoPatent in question: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5781752 http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5781752
- trengrj 11y ago"Table based data speculation" - so a lookup table?? Would be interested in knowing how innovative the patent is from someone with more knowledge in this field.
- neikos 11y agoFrom what I read it is mostly branch predicition with data pre-loading on the CPU Level.
- dyladan 11y agoIt seems to me that the ILP is able to begin execution of branches before the branch is known to be true. def func(): if predicate(): task1() else: task2() In the above program, the processor would be able to speculatively start execution of task1 before the predicate function returned a value. (obviously the processor does this on a much lower level than this code)
- timthorn 11y agoBear in mind the patent was filed in 1996 when considering the level of innovation.
- masklinn 11y agoThere were branch-predicting mainframes back in the 80s, though it really came to the fore with the advent of superscalar microprocessors in the early 90s (MIPS R8000 and DEC Alpha 21064), what is the paper's innovations above these?
- matthewmacleod 11y agoIt's pretty clear from even a cursory look – the patent covers a second level of branch prediction, where the processor determines whether or not it should bother speculatively executing an instruction based on the previous outcome of that speculative execution. Whether or not there was a prior implementation of this, I don't know – but it's also obviously more than a simple saturating counter branch predictor or whatever.
- mtgx 11y agoYou know what they say: Live by the patent sword... Why doesn't Apple start lobbying for real patent reform?
- rwmj 11y agoBecause it makes no sense for them to do so. Large companies join in cross-licensing agreements, keeping smaller competitors out. Occasionally some small player comes along with an important patent, and they refuse to be bought off and win in court. That makes the news like today because it happens so rarely. But it's a price worth paying to keep competition out of the market. Competition is so tedious.
- dtech 11y agoThis isn't a small company with a new idea that doesn't want to be bought out, this is an university.
- devit 11y agoLooks like the "idea" of the patent in the description is to use a predictor to predict when a STORE and LOAD alias and not speculate the LOAD and any instruction depending on the load (although the claims generalize this to any non-static dependency). As it generally happens in software/hardware patents, the claimed solution seems quite obvious whenever one wants to solve that particular problem, and the hard part is the "execution", i.e. implementing it efficiently and figuring out whether the tradeoffs are worth it. So assigning patents to things like this seems really dumb.
- bardworx 11y agoI strongly agree with you. To patent an idea with no definition of execution seems too broad to me. An easy example is to patent an "opening mechanism that requires force" (door). Yes, that's an idea but can have different ways to execute, sliding door, regular opening door, suicide doors. Now a patent on the hinge that performs the operation seems more concrete. The exact execution of said idea.
- roc 11y agoLuckily, patents aren't granted for ideas, but for specific executions. Granted, the execution is generally defined at a higher level than, say, "this exact chunk of silicon". But it's at a much lower level than the "idea".
- Tloewald 11y agoWhen it comes to digital technology patents are often granted for ideas or concepts so general as to be ridiculous. Whether those patents stand up in court is another thing but even there -- as in this case -- there are no guarantees of sanity. I hope Apple will appeal.
- baldfat 11y agoThe more general and broad the patent the more valuable it is. The system rewards big general patents.
- 11y ago
- werber 11y agoI don't get how they settled out of court and then did it again, that seems really bizare.
- dtech 11y agoSettled with a different company.
- monochromatic 11y agoArticle says it was UW in both cases. edit: disregard, I don't read good
- msbarnett 11y agoUW holds the patent. UW sued Intel. This lawsuit was settled. UW then sued Apple. A different company. Why would the fact that the suit with Intel was settled impact their ability to sue Apple? What's the source of confusion here?
- monochromatic 11y agoWhoops, I can't read this morning.
- werber 11y agoOh duh. whoops
- rayiner 11y agoThis PDF explains what I discuss below in more detail: http://moodle.technion.ac.il/pluginfile.php/315285/mod_resource/content/1/tutorial3_winter_2013.pdf http://moodle.technion.ac.il/pluginfile.php/315285/mod_resou.... Prediction of aliasing is discussed on slide 25. The patent in question pertains to an optimization of what these days you'd call "memory disambiguation." In a processor executing instructions out of order, data dependencies can be known or ambiguous. A known data dependency is, for example, summing the results of two previous instructions that themselves each compute the product of two values. An ambiguous data dependency is usually a memory read after a memory write. The processor usually does not know the address of the store until it executes the store. So it can't tell whether a subsequent load must wait behind the store (if it reads from the same address), or can safely be moved ahead of it (if it reads from a different address). If you have the appropriate machinery, you can speculatively execute that later load instruction. But you need some mechanism to ensure that if you guess wrong--that subsequent load really does read from the same address as the earlier store--you can roll back the pipeline and re execute things in the correct order. But flushing that work and replaying is slow. If you've got a dependent store-load pair, you want to avoid the situation where misspeculation causes you to have to flush and reply every time. The insight of the patent is that these dependent store-load pairs have temporal locality. Using a small table, you can avoid most misspeculations by tracking these pairs in the table and not speculating the subsequent load if you get a table hit. That specific use of a prediction table is what is claimed by the patent. Maybe this is worth a patent, or maybe not. For what it's worth, I don't think anybody was doing memory disambiguation at all in 1996. Intel was one of the first (maybe the first) to do so commercially in the mid-2000's. Apple's Cyclone architecture also does it, and I think it was the first in the low-power SoC space to do it.
- mzs 11y agoAlpha 21264 (also from '96) had load store buffers that would notice the dependence violations and flush the pipeline during speculative execution. Sparc and power also had this to some extent with write buffers. I can't think of any that used a predictor though to decide whether to execute speculatively or not back then, they all just either did or stalled on the first potential violation. The patent appears novel for the time to me, thank you for digging it up and explaining.
- monochromatic 11y agoHow is this journalism? It doesn't even tell you the damn patent number.
- DanBC 11y agoAt the top of the gray bar there's a "Contact BBC News" link. (Not the "contact us" link at the very bottom of the page.) For this article it's here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682 Please do let them know that they need to start linking, or at least naming, documents that they're talking about. They do it all the time and I agree it's annoying. They'll discuss a medical study and not have any links to it. Sometimes they don't even name the report nor where it appeared.
- talmand 11y agoWhen I see examples of that my nature is to immediately question the validity of the story.
- revelation 11y agoThis is how journalism operates in the internet. I don't think I've ever seen a report that had an actual working external link in it. I don't even click links in news articles anymore because they inevitably lead to some bullshit more news of this type on our site meta-page.
- superuser2 11y agoGiven that only those currently affiliated with a university can read medical studies, I can't blame them too much for that one.
- JamesMcMinn 11y agoThe portion of the BBCs audience who actually want to know the patent number is tiny, and the portion who would actually understand the patent itself is a tiny fraction of those, so why include it? Those who are interested can go out and find it themselves without much difficulty. The job of a journalist isn't report every fact, it's to cut through the noise, take something that happened and condense it into something that their audience will read and can understand, without distorting it. This article does exactly that. That's why it's journalism.
- DannyBee 11y agoIn general, I welcome the day when universities get what is coming to them for this kind of stuff (see also: Marvell vs CMU for 300+ million, reduced from 1.5 billion on appeal, etc). In particular, given how much industry funds them, collaborates with their professors, etc, what is going on now is a remarkably stupid approach mostly driven by tech transfer offices that want to prove their value. Which will be "zero", once the tech industry starts cutting them off.
- mentat 11y agoYou think they're funding researchers at market rates?
- DannyBee 11y agoDo you think the universities would really be getting anywhere without the help of the industries they are now pissing on? Take away the faculty awards, industry collaborations, donated labs, donated computing time, hiring of interns, etc.
- cozzyd 11y agoAwesome, maybe the Brewers need a new stadium too.
- propter_hoc 11y agoThis is sort of a depressing precedent. Do we really want to turn our universities into patent trolls?
- galilyou498 11y agoIf they are trolling other patent trolls, then why not?
- danbee 11y agoTwo wrongs don't make a right.
- ChrisLTD 11y agoA self-destructive spiral might spur legislative action.
- minority-one 11y agoSometimes it does. Fight fire with fire, an eye for an eye, history is replete with references to common sense refuting what you are saying.
- Cookingboy 11y agoOnly on HackerNews is Apple and Intel labeled patent trolls.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoYou have to fund that stuff somehow, the state governments certainly aren't doing it anymore.
- toufka 11y agoIt has already happened. As was pointed out, it is a direct result of the Bayh-Dole Act [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
- 11y ago
- Kristine1975 11y ago>The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer. How can it be that the research of this university isn't in the public domain? The public paid for it, the public should reap the benefits without paying again. Sure, Apple tries their hardest not to pay taxes, but the patent isn't limited to them.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wmf 11y agoI guess the university can provide better services[1] to the public if it's profitable. [1] Like an NFL-class stadium.
- joezydeco 11y agoAnd those copyrights get enforced.
- SixSigma 11y agoI'm not trying to be snarky but are you being serious ? Because NFL-Class Stadium is not one of the features I would think of if I was doing a bullet list of things a university should have. My 30k student university has a sports hall and a gym.
- joezydeco 11y agoSome of the major college football programs have a net worth over half a billion dollars each. The University of Texas Leghorns (men's football program) brings in over USD$130 million a year. UT has 50K students. http://www.ibj.com/blogs/4-the-score/post/45498-notre-dame-no-2-in-ranking-of-football-riches-iu-tops-purdue http://www.ibj.com/blogs/4-the-score/post/45498-notre-dame-n...
- maxerickson 11y ago
- msravi 11y agoUWisc has always been very aggressive with its patents. I recall sometime during 2002 or thereabouts, while working for a reasonably big semiconductor company with DSP/ARM processors, one of the guys in our team with an interest in computer architecture, used the company network to download and play with a simulator or something (might have been simplescalar). A few weeks later the head of our group gets contacted by the company lawyers saying that UWisc was asking for licensing costs for using their tools (they provided the ip address that was used to download the tools). I'm not sure how it was resolved finally, but I don't think the company paid.
- DannoHung 11y agoI have one question: Do the professors teach this technique in classes? I mean, that'd be funny, right? Teaching students something that you patented, waiting a few years for them to go into industry and apply what they learned, then suing them for it.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoI have no sympathy for Apple in this matter. Considering the worthless, prior art ridden patents they used against their competitors they deserve the blowback. And in keeping with their modus operandi they ignored the University of Wisconsin and wilfully infringed the patent.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoUW should take the money and use it to endow a chair of processor engineering. Or maybe a table of processor engineering. That could work too.
- bwilliams18 11y agoWhat if patents could only be held by individuals and not corporations?
- Eric_WVGG 11y agoI suppose you’d have to fix that “American corporate personhood” problem first
- lotharbot 11y agoCorporate Personhood is an intentional design goal of US law. The earliest case I'm aware of dealing with "corporate personhood" is The Rev John Bracken v. The Visitors of Wm & Mary College, from 1790, which is discussed in the linked article [0] (page 434 discusses the founder's wishes, treating the corporation as an extension of the will of its founder, through its charter.) The rest of US case law, long before Citizens United, follows this same pattern -- corporations, being "merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose" [1], function legally as individuals in many ways, with the right to speak and own property and other such things that fit with the purpose for which they are founded. A relevant quote from US case law: "The principle at stake is not peculiar to unions. It is applicable as well to associations of manufacturers, retail and wholesale trade groups, consumers' leagues, farmers' unions, religious groups, and every other association representing a segment of American life and taking an active part in our political campaigns and discussions .... It is therefore important -- vitally important -- that all channels of communication be open to [all of the above types of associations] during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community." [2] [0] http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2366&context=wmlr http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=23... [1] Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 1888 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/125/181/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/125/181/ [2] United States v. Auto Workers, 1957 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/352/567/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/352/567/
- viewer5 11y agoAnd then the individuals would grant use licenses to the corporations, so they can implement the process/manufacture the good/etc?
- skaevola 11y agoI'm curious how the university could discover that Apple was using its patent. The internal characteristics of the processor must be secret, right? Do they examine die photos and reconstruct the gate netlist?
- dba7dba 11y ago$862m? Isn't that little bit less than what Samsung paid to Apple? I tell ya, this tech news stuff is sometimes more entertaining than infotainment on TV.