Tuesday, December 8th 2015
AMD Responds to Asetek's R9 Fury X Sales Cease-and-Desist
AMD issued a response to a recent report which states that liquid cooling components maker Asetek issued a cease-and-desist to the company, to stop sales of the Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card, which implements a closed-loop liquid-cooling solution made by Cooler Master. In its response, AMD argues that the jury in the Asetek vs. CMI (Cooler Master) case did not mention the cooling solution of the Radeon R9 Fury X specifically, as infringing Asetek-held patents. The statement reads:
Source:
Gamers Nexus
"We are aware that Asetek has sued Cooler Master. While we defer to Cooler Master regarding the details of the litigation, we understand that the jury in that case did not find that the Cooler Master heat sink currently used with the Radeon Fury X infringed any of Asetek's patents."While AMD is right in pointing out that the original judgement does not name the R9 Fury X, or its cooling solution as an infringing product; there's no word on whether AMD will stop sales of the card. From the looks of it, AMD has no plans to stop sales of its flagship graphics product, and appears to have convincing legal arguments up its sleeves to continue selling the card, in the near future.
26 Comments on AMD Responds to Asetek's R9 Fury X Sales Cease-and-Desist
AMD is 100% responsible for the components they source for their video cards. Especially if those components are unreliable or use unlicensed designs. Right now AMD are behaving like children, hanging on a technicality.
"We are aware that Asetek has sued Cooler Master. While we defer to Cooler Master regarding the details of the litigation, we understand that the jury in that case did not find that the Cooler Master heat sink currently used with the Radeon Fury X infringed any of Asetek’s patents"
I'm all for AMD in the hope for healthy competition that would lead to better products and lower prices for the consumer, but I don't want them to get there like this, because once they're there they'll just continue being douchebags. I want them to get there on meritocracy principles.
Whatever you are seeing here is not from the real world.
So one of the products that the court ruled in favor of Asetek was the Seidon 120M. AFTER the ruling:So there are two Gigabyte video cards that use a variant of a "Seidon 120M" cooler and the AMD Fury X, that has basically the same variant of the cooler.
As I said, a technicality, if the Seidon 120M infringes on the "pump inside the cooling block" then the variants of the cooler do so too. Since they all have the pump in the exact same location. Asetek is trying to talk to Gigabyte and AMD without involving the courts. They tried to talk with CMI too, but they refused to pay for the license.
Reading is something. Understanding, now there's the trick...
They are also being more than reasonable with the licensing to allow other companies to use the idea.Correct, it isn't AMD's fault, but they are selling a product that contains another product that is in violation. The burden falls on CoolerMaster, but you are completely correct with the bill collector anology, because I bet AMD is pressuring CoolerMaster pretty hard to pay the licensing fees the courts order them to pay.The only problem is that a jury did find the cooler infinges on AseTek's patents. They found that any CoolerMaster product that uses the pump/block combo is using AseTek's patents, and CoolerMaster has to pay the court ordered licensing fees. Just because they added an extra part that now cools the VRM doesn't mean the original infringing part isn't infringing anymore.
The only thing that worries me is that the Dual GPU Fiji will be held up by this.
Apart from that, read it again again again, I afraid your last comment is ironic.
Take a look at the patents used by Asetek in Coolermaster case:
patents.google.com/patent/US8240362B2/en
www.google.co.in/patents/US8245764
vrworld.com/2014/07/02/aseteks-watercooling-patent-will-hurt-consumers/
Try again, 7,971,632 filed on Nov. 8, 2004. The Aquagate products didn't hit the market until 2005. And if you read the patents, you'll notice they are similar, containing a lot of the same drawings. This is because all their other patents are updates of this original patent, them adding to the original patent of the pump/block combo. And this is just the first patent to contain the pump/block combo, they have cooling system patents going back to 2000.