Intel and Texas Instruments have been sued by a subsidiary of
patent holding company Acacia Technologies for allegedly infringing
a patent relating to a process used in advanced pipeline
processors.
Microprocessor Enhancement Corporation filed suit in the
District Court for the Central District of California, alleging
infringement by Intel's Itanium line of microprocessors and a
series of digital signal processors sold by Texas Instruments.
The patent in question relates to a system used in advanced
pipeline processors – which allow for multiple parts of a computer
instruction to be dealt with at the same time, speeding up
performance.
According to Acacia, this particular system allows for the
conditional execution of processor instructions, and a later
determination of whether the instructions executed should be
written back to memory.
Acacia Technologies is better known for litigation over a patent
relating to a widely used means of streaming audio or video files
over the internet.
