PS3's Cell Processor Faces Patent Challenge
July 31, 2007 | by Nick Mokey
Grind up your PS3, a California company says it was the first to patent the concept behind the Cell processor and wants Sony's allegedly infringing systems gone.
You may have thought that the Cell processor powering the PlayStation 3 was a fairly new innovation in processing technology – but according to a California-based Parallel Processing Corp., its company developed the technology and patented it back in 1991. A lawsuit filed on Thursday in the Texas Eastern Federal District Court alleges that Sony ‘s processor infringes on Parallel Processing Corp.’s patent.
The patent is for “A high speed computer that permits the partitioning of a single computer program into smaller concurrent processes running in different parallel processors.” Oddly enough, Sony’s own patent, filed in 2001 and issued in 2007, actually lists the 1991 patent as a citation. In other words, Sony’s own patent lawyers have already seen the old patent and deemed it not to be a threat, and the U.S. Patent Office apparently agreed when it issued Sony the patent in June.
That’s no guarantee that Parallel Processing Corp. doesn’t have a case, but it makes their somewhat outlandish outcome seem a little less likely. According to NextGen, the company is demanding “the impounding and destruction of all Defendant’s products that infringe the ‘000 Patent.” Lock up your PS3’s, kids!
Post Your Comment...Comments
benjamin on Jul 31st, 2007 at 3:12 PM:
"I thought of it first! I win! Pay me for my ideas! Waa!!!"
Has anyone even heard of this company? It's obvious they're on welfare, selling their children for crack and sex to fund their outrageous cable and cell phone bills. These people should be hung, or better...
Glen Zabriskie on Aug 7th, 2007 at 10:22 AM:
Someone at Parallel Processing Corp. needs to GOOGLE "Atari Transputer Workstation" and STFU!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Work...
Callum Dickinson on Aug 9th, 2007 at 10:36 PM:
If Sony actually mentions the 1991 patent and the Patent Office deems it not being a threat aswell, then Parallel have no chance of winning this. At all.
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V. Anderson on Jul 31st, 2007 at 12:56 PM:
Seems to me this "improvement" should be intuitively obvious. Unless STI copied the method for sorting out instruction processing strategies, there should not be a problem. Even if they did, I suspect it was published somewhere, before the 1991 patent. Most of us seriously into computer science had daydreamed of this sort of thing years ago when we were clustering processors to get data center cpu power up. No one should be allowed to patent an idea, unless they can at least prototype it, and get the prototype to actually work. If Parallel processing prototyped this in 1991, they have had sixteen years to develop and market it. That is long enough. On the other hand if Parallel processing actually builds and sells micro processors with the capabilities of the STI devices, and they can prove STI is waiting on the patent to expire, they should get a nice check. Terminating the technology is pretty irresponsible. If the US does not stop the patent non-sense, we are going to end up unable to develop or use anything technical here.