Being a lawyer for Apple right now is a very lucrative job. Apple’s managed to earn the ire of yet another company. This time, it’s Opti. Don’t worry, I’ve never heard of them either.
Apparently Apple has violated three patents they own regarding “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.” What does that mean though? Let’s check the patent.
When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes. The controller then allows the burst access to take place between secondary memory and the PCI-bus master, and simultaneously and predictively, performs an inquire cycle of the L1 cache for the next cache line. In this manner, if the PCI burst continues past the cache line boundary, the new inquire cycle will already have taken place, or will already be in progress, thereby allowing the burst to proceed with, at most, a short delay. Predictive snoop cycles are not performed if the first transfer of a PCI-bus master access would be the last transfer before a cache line boundary is reached.
Riiight. Even I’m feeling a little geeked out by that definition. Like so many other suits, this will probably fade into background noise.
I read elsewhere in an article, that Apple's not the only target of Opti's lawsuits.
They battled nVidia, and settled for $7 million. A suit is ongoing with AMD, I believe. I suppose they're getting more confident...