AMD Files Complaint Against Realtek, TCL for Graphics Patent Infringement

[Raevenlord]

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[bonehead123]

So.... in other words: All this stuff are belong to us, and you can't have any !

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....

 

[_Flare]

AMD will not avoid anyone to license their IP, wich costed itself R&D obviously.
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

 

[Daven]

So.... in other words: All this stuff are belong to us, and you can't have any !

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....

You’re thinking about patent trolls. In this case, the IP is used in real products sold in real markets. The IP was developed and paid for by a real company. IMHO, this is the correct use of patent litigation. The fact that lawyers are used is just the way the judicial branch works. We wouldn’t want Lisa Su or any competent engineers wasting their time on this.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

Does this mean AMD walked out on settling this out of court? I bet they did. Now you gotta ask if this was a flagrant foul or not.

 

[FanboysMakeTheWorldWorse]

So.... in other words: All this stuff are belong to us, and you can't have any !

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....

These kind of lawsuits do suck, it's a fine line between protecting your R&D investments and curtailing technological progress by putting intellectual property behind a wall of 'legalese' where people can't use it.

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 : https://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) : https://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.

 

[Jism]

These kind of lawsuits do suck, it's a fine line between protecting your R&D investments and curtailing technological progress by putting intellectual property behind a wall of 'legalese' where people can't use it.

Well with a patent they have 2 options,

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.

 

[Zareek]

I'm very conflicted on this one. While I feel that companies have a right to protect their inventions and make a profit from them. I also feel like the patent system takes things too far in this day and age. Back when it took twenty years to get a technology into homes, the patent system we have now makes sense. Now it seems outdated and wrong. Creating environments where companies cannot compete. Resulting in monopolies and duopolies that stifle the market and innovation. I think AMD has probably recovered what they invested inventing these technologies and made a handsome profit already. How long should the inventor of a technology hold that technology hostage? What is fair? I'm not sure, nor am I making any claims that AMD didn't offer fair licensing terms. It just seems this sort of headline is too common, and God knows there is almost no competition outside a handful of mega corporations.

 

[robert3892]

AMD put a lot of money into developing their GPU technologies. They have a complete right to ask for products that violate their patents to be blocked from being imported into the USA.

 

[zlobby]

You’re thinking about patent trolls. In this case, the IP is used in real products sold in real markets. The IP was developed and paid for by a real company. IMHO, this is the correct use of patent litigation. The fact that lawyers are used is just the way the judicial branch works. We wouldn’t want Lisa Su or any competent engineers wasting their time on this.

And this isn't some broad patent BS a lá Apple and their round corners. This time AMD has spent significant resources on R&D.

And all this comes from me, a person advocating free and open knowledge sharing. Ironic, huh?

 

[Space Lynx]

AMD put a lot of money into developing their GPU technologies. They have a complete right to ask for products that violate their patents to be blocked from being imported into the USA.

just fyi, AMD is HQ'd in California. it already is an American company.

 

[looniam]

for the curious on mobile, i'll just leave these (that i got from thg) here:

U.S. Patent for Processing unit that enables asynchronous task dispatch Patent (Patent # 8,854,381 issued October 7, 2014) - Justia Patents Search

A processing unit that includes a plurality of virtual engines and a shader core. The plurality of virtual engines is configured to (i) receive, from an operating system (OS), a plurality of tasks substantially in parallel with each other and (ii) load a set of state data associated with each of...

patents.justia.com

U.S. Patent for Graphics processing architecture employing a unified shader Patent (Patent # 8,760,454 issued June 24, 2014) - Justia Patents Search

A graphics processing architecture in one example performs vertex manipulation operations and pixel manipulation operations by transmitting vertex data to a general purpose register block, and performing vertex operations on the vertex data b a processor unless the general purpose register block...

patents.justia.com

U.S. Patent for Texture decompression techniques Patent (Patent # 11,184,628 issued November 23, 2021) - Justia Patents Search

A texture decompression method is described. The method comprises receiving a compressed texture block, determining a partition of pixels used for the compressed texture block, wherein the partition includes one or more disjoint subsets into which data in the compressed texture block is to be...

patents.justia.com

 

[thesmokingman]

These days you literally cannot make a gpu w/o stepping on either Nvidia or AMD patents so you're forced to license. And this is where the two companies in question didn't give a F about it.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

These days you literally cannot make a gpu w/o stepping on either Nvidia or AMD patents so you're forced to license. And this is where the two companies in question didn't give a F about it.

Intel, Imagination technology, Arm, Open GPU, they're are more I'm sure, you don't have to pay those two.
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.

 

[thesmokingman]

Intel, Imagination technology, Arm, Open GPU, they're are more I'm sure, you don't have to pay those two.
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.

Actually Intel struck a deal with AMD in 2016. Previously they were with Nvidia.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Actually Intel struck a deal with AMD in 2016. Previously they were with Nvidia.

That's not getting rid of all the options down to two though yet.

 

[eidairaman1]

These kind of lawsuits do suck, it's a fine line between protecting your R&D investments and curtailing technological progress by putting intellectual property behind a wall of 'legalese' where people can't use it.

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 : https://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) : https://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.

Tcl is chinesium

AMD put a lot of money into developing their GPU technologies. They have a complete right to ask for products that violate their patents to be blocked from being imported into the USA.

Before AMD it was ATi, they have been around over 30 years (GPU division)

There was also Hercules

 

[zlobby]

Intel, Imagination technology, Arm, Open GPU, they're are more I'm sure, you don't have to pay those two.
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.

And we all see what intel have to offer in terms of GPU, no?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

And we all see what intel have to offer in terms of GPU, no?

What do you mean, they're smashing it, they get more PR pages out then Any other GPU maker, and are burning through generations like no one else.

What you want to buy one, me too , I like unicorn's, what , , ,what.

 

[Mistral]

TCL infringing on IP? Not too surprising...

 

[eidairaman1]

TCL infringing on IP? Not too surprising...

Yup PRC...