Monday, June 6th 2022
AMD Files Complaint Against Realtek, TCL for Graphics Patent Infringement
AMD and ATI Technologies ULC have filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) against Realtek Semiconductor and TCL Industries holdings. The complaint lists five patent infringements from both companies, mostly related to graphics technologies such as texture decompression, a unified shader approach to graphics architectures, a multi-threaded graphics processing system, as well as methods to synchronize thread wavefront data and events and a patent covering a processing unit for asynchronous dispatch.
According to AMD, both companies integrated solutions based on AMD's intellectual property without appropriate, prior licensing. The USITC has already come forward with an investigation announcement towards a number of Realtek and TCL-designed products, including graphics systems, digital televisions, and assorted components, found in some products shipped and sold in the U.S. market. The lawsuit aims for an exclusion order and cease and desist on sales of affected products.This isn't AMD's first rodeo related to graphics technologies litigation, as the company has previously received a settlement from a number of manufacturers (including LG, MediaTek, and Visio) on a similar patent infringement lawsuit.
Sources:
via Tom's Hardware, Bloomberg Law
According to AMD, both companies integrated solutions based on AMD's intellectual property without appropriate, prior licensing. The USITC has already come forward with an investigation announcement towards a number of Realtek and TCL-designed products, including graphics systems, digital televisions, and assorted components, found in some products shipped and sold in the U.S. market. The lawsuit aims for an exclusion order and cease and desist on sales of affected products.This isn't AMD's first rodeo related to graphics technologies litigation, as the company has previously received a settlement from a number of manufacturers (including LG, MediaTek, and Visio) on a similar patent infringement lawsuit.
20 Comments on AMD Files Complaint Against Realtek, TCL for Graphics Patent Infringement
Well, at least not without writing us a massive check anyways, hehehe :)
Always pisses me off when I read about these types of lawsuits, 'cause the only people who actually benefit from them are the friggin greed-mongering, blood-suckin lawyers....
Speculating in how much such licensing costs is useless, unless the price is so high that it would securely lead to a no-deal.
And that does not sound like AMD being anykind of patent-troll IMHO
cheers
But Realtek are a sketchy as hell company, so I'm conflicted... Almost every issue I have had with my current computers and their drivers are almost exclusively down to Realtek components. It's impossible to find drivers for their hardware, yet they are EVERYWHERE. Their tech is in routers, motherboards, wifi devices, bluetooth devices... everywhere! and they almost always seem to be built in a way that looks to me like they have cut every corner imaginable to reduce costs and maximise profit at the expense of creating reliable components, you just need to take a look at this blog post to get an idea of the scale of the problem with Realtek : overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
Then go look at their 'website' and try to find anything actually useful to a consumer (the site is absolutely atrocious, it feels similar to scam sites with just enough content and presence to fake looking legit) : www.realtek.com/en
Realtek is a bargain basement dumpster fire of a company mass producing shitty components at unprecedented scale that are destined for eWaste sooner than they should be, but lots of companies use them because their probably the cheapest parts to source. The sooner they get shoved out the market the better, or at least forced to up their standards.
Design it yourself, from scratch, in a different way rather then infriding that patent, or
License the IP from AMD and have permission to create products and sell it commercially on the market.
If there where no patents anyone even striving forward in terms of tech advancements would be copied all over the place.
Best example to this day is AMD comes up with infinity cache. Whipes nvidia with far less resources. Nvidia simply increases L2 cache on it's next generation of GPU's to tackle AMD's advantage. No breach in patents, just a workaround.
And all this comes from me, a person advocating free and open knowledge sharing. Ironic, huh?
patents.justia.com/patent/8854381
patents.justia.com/patent/8760454
patents.justia.com/patent/11184628
You could design your own, pay a license, or just cheat and save money.
It's clear which path was taken.
Though I do agree patents are often a play on words that vaguely describe a thing, and something needs to be done.
There was also Hercules
What you want to buy one, me too , I like unicorn's, what , , ,what.:p