The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) successfully established before a United States federal jury that Apple Inc. had incorporated technology protected by WARF’s U.S. Patent No. 5,781,752 (the “‘752 patent”) into its A7, A8, and A8X processors, used in the iPhone 5s, 6, and 6 Plus. The jury ordered Apple to pay WARF $234 million in damages.<\/p>\n
The ‘752 patent, entitled “Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer,” was filed on December 26, 1996 and issued on July 14, 1998. The named inventors were Drs. Andreas I. Moshovos, Scott E. Breach, Terani N. Vijaykumar, and Gurindar S. Sohi. WARF was listed as the original assignee and maintains that the named inventors conceived of the claimed invention no later than December 11, 1995.<\/p>\n
The ‘752 patent discloses a speculative prediction circuit capable of governing “out of order execution” of processor instructions in circumstances where the dependency between instructions is uncertain. This technique, known as “speculation” or “speculative execution,” permits the processor to use otherwise idle cycles to execute instructions provisionally, thereby improving efficiency when the speculative execution proves correct and produces the correct result.<\/p>\n
The patent describes a “three-tiered approach” to managing “ambiguous dependency.” The first tier employs a predictor based on the historical record of mis-speculations. The second tier describes a predictor circuit that identifies data dependencies on an ongoing and dynamic basis. The third tier involves a synchronisation table that indicates whether a pending instruction is awaiting the completion of a dependent instruction. The patent’s core concepts involve maintaining a small database of past prediction failures, applicable to various parallel execution techniques, and have become a feature of modern CPU design.<\/p>\n
Apple contested WARF’s claims, arguing that the ‘752 patent was invalid. The United States District Court jury rejected Apple’s invalidity argument, finding the patent valid and determining that infringement had occurred. After deliberating for three and a half hours, the jury returned a verdict that Apple was liable to pay $234 million for infringing WARF’s patent.<\/p>\n
The ‘752 patent had previously been the subject of a lawsuit brought by WARF against Intel. That matter was resolved with Intel paying $110 million in damages.<\/p>\n
This article is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a qualified attorney before acting on any matter discussed here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A federal jury found Apple liable for infringing WARF\u2019s patented CPU technology, resulting in $234 million in damages. The case underscores the importance of patented innovations in current processor designs and the legal challenges faced by technology companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":32,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[225,5119,7563,16,7562,7564,169,7561],"class_list":["post-30434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectual-property","category-patents","tag-apple","tag-damages","tag-federal-jury","tag-patent-infringement-2","tag-speculative-execution","tag-technology-litigation","tag-us-patent-law","tag-warf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30434"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149924,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30434\/revisions\/149924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}