AMD reached a settlement in the Class Action Lawsuit filed against it, over alleged false-marketing of the core-counts of its eight-core FX-series processors based on the "Bulldozer" microarchitecture. Each member of the Class receives a one-time payout of USD $35 per chip, while the company takes a hit of $12.1 million. The lawsuit dates back to 2015, when Tony Dickey, representing himself in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accused AMD of false-marketing of its FX-series "Bulldozer" processor of having 8 CPU cores. Over the following four years, the case gained traction as a Class Action was built against AMD this January.

In the months that followed the January set-up of a 12-member Jury to examine the case, lawyers representing the Class and AMD argued over the underlying technology that makes "Bulldozer" a multi-core processor, and eventually discussed what a fair settlement would be for the Class. They eventually agreed on a number - $12.1 million, or roughly $35 per chip AMD sold, which they agreed was "fair," and yet significantly less than the "$60 million in premiums" consumers contended they paid for these processors. Sifting through these numbers, it's important to understand what the Class consists of. It consists of U.S. consumers who became interested to be part of the Class Action, and who bought an 8-core processor based on the "Bulldozer" microarchitecture. It excludes consumers of every other "Bulldozer" derivative (4-core, 6-core parts, APUs; and follow-ups to "Bulldozer" such as "Piledriver," "Excavator," etc.).Image Credit: Taylor Alger

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF), the world's leading specialty foundry based in the United States, today filed multiple lawsuits in the U.S. and Germany alleging that semiconductor manufacturing technologies used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSMC) infringe 16 GF patents. The lawsuits were filed today in the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), the U.S. Federal District Courts in the Districts of Delaware and the Western District of Texas, and the Regional Courts of Dusseldorf and Mannheim in Germany.

In filing the lawsuits, GF seeks orders that will prevent semiconductors produced with the infringing technology by Taiwan-based TSMC, the dominant semiconductor manufacturer, from being imported into the U.S. and Germany. These lawsuits require GF to name certain major customers of TSMC and downstream electronics companies, who, in most cases, are the actual importers of the products that incorporate the infringing TSMC technology. GF also seeks significant damages from TSMC based on TSMC's unlawful use of GF's proprietary technology in its tens of billions of dollars of sales.

The new year does not seem to bring good tidings alone for NVIDIA, with yet another class action lawsuit promising to keep their legal team busy. When we first posted about NVIDIA stock prices falling 2.1% following the launch of their Turing microarchitecture cards, there was no warning that just a few days after that post things would get worse. Indeed, as of today, the NVIDIA stock price on the NASDAQ stock market has fallen nearly 54% from the 1-year high that was only this past calendar quarter. California-based Schall law firm believes this drop in price can be attributed to more than just the volatile trading that has been ongoing in general in the stock markets, and has decided to file a class action lawsuit against NVIDIA.

Schall Law believes, and we quote, "the Company made false and misleading statements to the market. NVIDIA touted its ability to monitor the cryptocurrency market and make rapid changes to its business as necessary. The Company claimed to be "masters at managing our channel, and we understand the channel very well." NVIDIA also claimed to the market that any drop off in demand for its GPUs amongst cryptocurrency miners would not negatively impact the Company's business because of strong demand for GPUs from the gaming market. Based on these facts, the Company's public statements were false and materially misleading throughout the class period. When the market learned the truth about NVIDIA, investors suffered damages." These are strong words indeed, as oft is the case with the launch of class action lawsuits, and they have put out a press statement to accompany a link for those wanting to join along which can be seen in the source below.

Remember the lawsuit ZeniMax threw Oculus' way? Well, that seems to be settled now, after a back and forward that always saw Oculus (even after the Facebook acquisition) having to pay damages to ZeniMax - at first, $500 million, which was then reduced to $250 million.

Now, the litigation seems to have come to an end, as CNBC reports that ZeniMax's CEO has acknowledged that a settlement was reached. The terms of the settlement were undisclosed (and so was the sum that Facebook definitely had to pay ZeniMax), but CNBC got a statement from the ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman that read: "We are pleased that a settlement has been reached and are fully satisfied by the outcome. While we dislike litigation, we will always vigorously defend against any infringement or misappropriation of our intellectual property by third parties." While ZeniMax says they are fully satisfied with the outcome, it's certainly a far cry from the original up to $4 billion and Oculus sales being blocked that the company was after in the initial terms of the lawsuit.

Earlier in January of this year, PUBG Corp threw a lawsuit at Epic Games, looking to assert its rights to the "Battle Royale" mode that game was mimicking from the original Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. It now seems that PUBG Corp has decided to throw in the towel over its pursuit of Epic Games' Fortnite as a "straight copy" of its battle royale mode - a move that came only after Fortnite had eclipsed PUBG Corp's game in concurrent players and revenue generation.

Perhaps at least part of this issue was dealt with by Chinese giant Tencent, which owns part of Bluehole Inc (PUBG Corp's parent company) and part of Epic Games - it hurts investors when two of their pots are throwing dirt at each other. Another part of the equation - and the most likely, considering the amount of time the lawsuit survived in court - pertains to how PUBG makes use of EPIC Games' Unreal Engine. I'd say it's at least slightly important to keep a good relationship with such a company.

Despite the grunt of the media's attention and overall customer rage having been thrown largely at Intel, AMD hasn't moved past the Spectre/Meltdown well, meltdown, unscathed. News has surfaced that at least two law firms have announced their intention of filing a class action lawsuit against AMD, accusing the company of not having disclosed their products' Spectre vulnerability, despite knowledge of said vulnerabilities.

AMD stated loud and clear that their processors weren't affected by the Meltdown flaw. However, regarding Spectre, AMD's terms weren't as clear cut. The company stated that its CPUs were vulnerable to the Spectre 1 flaw (patchable at a OS level), but said that vulnerability to Spectre 2's variant had "near-zero risk of exploitation". At the same time, the company also said that "GPZ Variant 2 (Branch Target Injection or Spectre) is applicable to AMD processors", adding that "While we believe that AMD's processor architectures make it difficult to exploit Variant 2, we continue to work closely with the industry on this threat.

Following reports of Intel's gross mishandling of its CPU vulnerabilities Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715), and Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754); particularly its decision to not call off 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" processor launch after learning of its vulnerability; and a general barrage of "false marketing" allegations, with a dash of "insider trading" allegations added to the mix, the company is bracing for an avalanche of class-action lawsuits in the US, and similar legal action around the world.

Owners of Intel CPU-based computers in California, Oregon, and Indiana, have filed separate complaints alleging that Intel sold vulnerable processors even after the discovery of Meltdown and Spectre; that the chips being sold were "inherently faulty," and that patches that fix them are both an "inadequate response to the problem," and "hurt performance" (false marketing about performance), by 5 to 30 percent. All three complainants are in the process of building Classes.

Newegg (owned by Beijing-based Hangzhou Liaison Interactive Information Technology) has been sued by a conglomerate of South Korean banks. The plaintiffs claim that the Southern California computer parts retailer has aided, abetted, and profited from enabling a Ponzi Scheme to take place with its products orders. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges that Newegg and ASI Corp., a South Korean computer wholesaler, made fraudulent orders from Korean hardware manufacturer Moneual, whose chief executive, Hong-seok Park, was sentenced in 2015 to 23 years in prison for financial fraud, and additionally subject to fines and forfeitures.

Newegg and ASI took part on the whole scheme by creating non-existent, exaggerated-pricing (sometimes 300x higher than market value) orders for Moneual products, thus allowing it to gain a higher valuation from investors. By inflating sales figures, the suit alleges that Moneual was able to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from South Korean banks. As a reward, Newegg and ASI received kickbacks from Moneual.

Asetek, a company known for designing water-cooling solutions for PC hardware that it sometimes licenses to other manufacturers, has lost a patent infringement lawsuit it had levied against Cooler Master. The lawsuit, which looked to impede the sale of Cooler Master products Nepton 120XL, Nepton 240M and Seidoen 120 V v.2, stated that Cooler Master was infringing on Asetek's European EP 1 923 771 patent, which describes a water cooling mechanism. This Asetek patent, filed in November 2004 and finally approved in May 2015, is in itself based on Asetek's older, US-bound patents.

However, The Hague's court has accepted Cooler Master's argument that they too have a similar patent to Asetek's, through a so-called "utility model" that already exists in China, which describes (and patents really show their problems here) the "operation of a water pumping engine device with chamber". The The Hague judge also invalidated Asetek's patent lawsuit on the basis that there was not enough inventiveness to it. Asetek and Cooler Master's legal battles aren't anything new; in 2015, a US-based court ordered Cooler Master to pay Asetek $600,000 for patent infringement. This time, it's the other way around, even though it was still Asetek that started the legal battle: the company now has to pay Cooler Master for their legal expenses, which amount to around €113,000 (~$134,204)

AMD Tuesday agreed to settle in its longstanding class-action lawsuit by investors for making misleading guidance over its first-generation accelerated processing units (APUs), codenamed "Llano." AMD was alleged to have oversold the potential of "Llano" in driving up revenues to the company, causing losses to investors. AMD is reported to have reached an agreement with the class to settle for USD $29.5 million. The settlement is yet to be approved by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who has been hearing the case since 2014, sitting in session for the US District Court in Oakland, California. Under the proposed deal, AMD's insurers foot the bill for the settlement, while it continues to deny any wrongdoing.

Russian-based Kaspersky Labs is backing away from its earlier threat of an antitrust case filing with the European Commission, instead opting for a "wait and see" approach with regards to its complaints with Microsoft over Windows 10 and its included security software "Windows Defender."

Kaspersky Labs has been threatening to press an antitrust action since November 2016, when in a November blog post titled "That's it. I've had enough!" Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky complained that Microsoft did not give developers ample time to prepare for a new Windows release, and was using their "compatibility checker" tool to effectively remove competing software in favor of Windows Defender.

Tough breakups aren't easy by definition, and the breakup between legendary programmer John Carmack and former employer ZeniMax has probably been one of the most worded of all. Now, Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack has filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax for $22.5 million, money he claims ZeniMax still owes him from id Softwares' $150 million sale to ZeniMax back in 2009. Carmack says the amount he is filling for is part of the $45 million owed to him for the sale, of which he has already been able to convert 22.5 million (the non-missing half) in ZeniMax shares. However, Carmack says ZeniMax is unlawfully withholding the remaining $22.5 million because of "sour grapes".

Carmack claims ZeniMax is holding back the payment as payback for "a series of allegations regarding claimed violations of Mr. Carmack's Employment Agreement", referencing the Zenimax/Facebook lawsuit over the supposed theft of trade secrets. However, Oculus was recently found not guilty of stealing trade secrets, though the court ordered the company to pay $500 million for copyright infringement, false designation and the violation of Palmer Luckey's NDA. Oculus is appealing the case, calling the prior ruling "legally flawed and factually unwarranted."

Earlier this month, Zenimax was awarded $500m when a jury found that VR pioneer Oculus had violated a NDA and illegally used code from the game publisher. That may just be the beginning of the legal ramifications facing Oculus however, as Zenimax has just asked the court to block Oculus from using the code involved in the court case altogether, potentially blocking the sale of a good number of games utilizing the technology of the Oculus VR headset.

Oculus is appealing the case, and calls the prior ruling "legally flawed and factually unwarranted." To their credit, the court did agree that while Oculus had violated a non-disclosure agreement, it did not find that they had committed the larger crime of stealing trade secrets.

ZeniMax Media Inc. has been awarded a $500 million settlement in a virtual reality (VR) patent dispute with Facebook-owned Oculus. A jury in Texas found Oculus in violation of VR patents held by ZeniMax. Oculus in 2014 was acquired by Facebook in a $2 billion deal. ZeniMax owns id Software, a pioneering game studio led by John Carmack. ZeniMax alleges that core components of Oculus Rift VR headset were developed by John Carmack, when he was working at a ZeniMax subsidiary, making them ZeniMax' intellectual property. Carmack left ZeniMax to work for Oculus in 2013.

As you may remember, "Llano" was somewhat of a disappointment for AMD, to put it mildly. Production issues with partner Global Foundries meant that Llano's roll-out was affected and extended beyond its predicted time-frame. This, in conjunction with other various factors, such as lack of product appeal over disappointing performance and the usual competition from Intel, forced AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing relative to diminishing demand, which resulted in unsold inventory, thus forcing an inventory write-down of "Llano" chips valued at around $100 million. This reduced the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanked the value of the AMD stock. This, of course, didn't sit well with investors.

The as-of-yet ongoing securities fraud lawsuit over AMD's "Llano" APUs has just achieved a milestone, in having been authorized by the Court to proceed as a class action. The Court's decision doesn't imply that the defendants (Rory P. Read, Thomas J. Seifert, Richard A. Bergman, and Dr. Lisa T. Su) did anything wrong. The defendants have not been ordered to pay any money, no settlement has been reached, no money is available as of now and there is no guarantee that there will be in the future.

NVIDIA settled in a 2015 class-action lawsuit against it, for misrepresenting the amount of memory on GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards. The company has agreed to pay every buyer of the card USD $30 (per card), and also cover the legal fees of the class, amounting to $1.3 million. The company, however, did not specify how much money it has set aside for the payout, and whether it will compensate only those buyers who constitute the class (i.e. buyers in the U.S., since that's as far as the court's jurisdiction can reach), or the thousands of GTX 970 buyers worldwide.

"The settlement is fair and reasonable and falls within the range of possible approval," attorneys for the proposed Class said in the filing. "It is the product of extended arms-length negotiations between experienced attorneys familiar with the legal and factual issues of this case and all settlement class members are treated fairly under the terms of the settlement." The class alleged that NVIDIA falsified the amount of memory a GeForce GTX 970 GPU can really use, when an investigation found that it could only address 3.5 GB of it properly. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang apologized to buyers about the issue and promised that it would never happen again.

Microsoft has been hit by the first successful lawsuit over its forced Windows 10 upgrade. The first of possibly many, Teri Goldstein from California, successfully sued Microsoft for $10,000 in damages and legal fees over its deceptively designed Windows 10 upgrade software, which automatically downloaded and upgraded her computer's Windows 7 installation almost without the consent of the user. She convinced the court that the upgrade made her computer slower, and that she lost business due to the upgrade process and the slowing down of her computer. Microsoft dropped its appeal and paid up.

Microsoft is heavily criticized for the way it distributes its free Windows 10 upgrade for PCs with Windows 7 and Windows 8. What started out as an optional upgrade, quickly evolved into an almost unavoidable upgrade that forces itself upon the users, through clever design of the upgrade software's user interface. Microsoft recently changed Windows 10 upgrade into a "recommended update" for Windows 7/8, making users with auto-install for recommended updates discover that their machines have been upgraded almost without their consent. Could this be the first of many successful lawsuits over this issue at least in a precedent-driven American civil justice system?

This week on TechPowerUp News: New AMD CPUs and APUs hit the stores; Seagate served a class-action lawsuit over false reliability claims of its hard drives; and more details of AMD "Zen" architecture.

Hard drive major Seagate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of abnormally high failure rates for its 1.5 TB and 3 TB internal and external/portable hard drives. It also accuses the company of false claims over "reliability" and "dependability" in its marketing.

The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.

The United States Federal Trade Commission (US-FTC) has found that Samsung Electronics did not infringe upon patents held by NVIDIA. In a ruling made by Judge Thomas Pender on Friday (09/10), it's held that Samsung did not infringe two out of three NVIDIA-claimed patents, it did infringe upon a third one, but that patent is invalid because it's not a new invention compared to previously known patents.

Samsung manufactures the Exynos brand ARM SoCs for its own smartphones, which embed a graphics core that NVIDIA claims is based on patent infringing technology. NVIDIA, which claims that it invented the first GPU and released it in 1999, accused Samsung and Qualcomm of using its patents on graphics chip technology without permission. The company claims that both Samsung Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon (which make up a majority of Android device chips), breach its IPR. Its claims don't seem to hold water with the US-FTC. "We remain confident in our case," commented NVIDIA spokesperson Robert Sherbin to Reuters. The ruling will be reviewed by the full bench of the commission in February 2016.

Over-promising and under-delivering with its very first accelerated processing units (APU), codenamed "Llano," is coming back to haunt AMD, with a US District Court ruling that the company must face claims from investors over potential securities fraud. Launched in Q3-2012, AMD's A-series "Llano" APUs went largely unsold due to various factors including lack of product appeal, competition from Intel, forcing AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. The related development first took shape in January 2014.

The swelling unsold "Llano" inventory forced an inventory writedown of $100 million, reducing the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanking the value of the AMD stock. While AMD talked about the concept of an APU for years, Intel was the first to come out with a processor that integrates a graphics processor, with its Core i3 and Core i5 "Clarkdale" processors. The suit claims that AMD misrepresented production of "Llano" chips to its investors despite supply issues from its foundry partner GlobalFoundries, artificially inflating the value of the company in 2011-12. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing resulting in unsold inventory, and in consequence, the $100 million writeoff.

ZiiLabs Inc., Ltd. ("ZiiLabs") today announced that it filed a patent infringement lawsuit ("the lawsuit") in the United States against Samsung and Apple. The lawsuit alleges that certain products of Samsung (including various Galaxy phones and tablets, and laptops) and Apple (including various ranges of the iPhone and iPad, iMac and MacBook Pro) infringe a number of ZiiLabs patents.

ZiiLabs owns over 100 US patents in the graphics, processor and 3D spaces. Ten of these patents have been asserted in the lawsuit, in which ZiiLabs is claiming past and future damages for patent infringement, and injunctions against Samsung and Apple.

Macronix International Co., Ltd. , a global leader providing non-volatile memory solutions, announced that it has filed a patent infringement law suit against Spansion LLC and Spansion Inc. in the United States for infringement of seven Macronix patents directed to numerous aspects of flash memory. Macronix has taken this step to address Spansion's rampant infringement of Macronix's patent rights.

The seven patents relate to manufacturing of flash memory chips, compact memory with serial interfaces, security of memory cells, and circuit designs for flash memory. The patents in suit represent only a small fraction of Macronix world-wide patent portfolio.

Micron Technology, Inc., announced today that it reached an agreement with Oracle America Inc. to settle a lawsuit filed by Oracle against Micron in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The lawsuit alleged a conspiracy to increase DRAM prices and other violations of federal and state antitrust and unfair competition laws based on purported conduct for the period from Aug. 1, 1998, through at least June 15, 2002, and sought joint and several damages, trebled, as well as restitution, disgorgement, attorneys' fees, costs and injunctive relief. Pursuant to the settlement agreement, the parties agreed to a settlement and release of all claims and a dismissal with prejudice of the litigation.

The lawyer armies of both Google and Apple have yet another battle on their hands as last week one PanoMap Technologies, LLC, a virtually unknown company based in Florida, sued both of them for patent infringement.

Filed in Orlando federal court, PanoMap's complaint claims that the Street View feature of the Google Maps iOS app violates US Patent No. 6,563,529. This patent is entitled "Interactive system for displaying detailed view and direction in panoramic images" and it describes "A method and system for indicating the camera position, direction, and field of view in a map or panoramic image comprises a map image window which displays a map or panoramic image of the site to be studied (house, apartment, city, etc.)."

The 6,563,529 patent was given to scientist Jerry Jongerius back in 2003 and was transferred to Empire IP in 2011. PanoMap got a hold of it (through another transfer, gotta love this) only this month (on February 14th to be exact).

PanoMap says Google and Apple were aware of their infringement and wants triple damages.