Graphics Rendering Patent Suits Target Apple, Samsung, HTC, RIM, LG and Sony 159
angry tapir writes "Formerly known as Silicon Graphics, Graphics Properties Holdings has filed six separate patent cases against Apple, Samsung, Research In Motion, HTC, Sony and LG with the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patent at issue in the lawsuits relates to floating point calculations to render graphics, and is registered as patent number 8,144,158 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."
Et tu, SGI? (Score:2)
Back in the mid-late '90s, I was a dedicated SGI user, working on an Indy with PhotoShop 3.0 and all that good stuff.
I'm disappointed to see SGI apparently taking the SCO path here.
(Ironically, I administered a SCO OpenSewer box far more recently than I got to use any SGI kit.)
Re:Et tu, SGI? (Score:4, Funny)
So tell me what you are administering right now, so I can avoid it due to it becoming first obsolete and then nasty :)
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Windows.
Too late, buddy.
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The haven't fallen to the level of SCO yet. SCO did stuff and then fabricated a claim that IBM did that stuff and thus violated their contract. SCO lied about their copyright status for other materials. They lied about ownership (fraud).
This patent claim by SCO is different. While it is painful to see SCO using patents not innovation to make money is likely truthful.
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New line of business (Score:4, Funny)
"Silicon Graphics -> Graphics Properties Holdings"
Now you have to change your name when you go from "making and selling" to "patent trolling"?
Ludicrous! What will be next? Bankers renaming themselves to Society Leeches?
Re:New line of business (Score:4, Informative)
Rackable aquired the "SGI" name as part of buying off of the old SGI's assets IIRC.
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ignore the "off of," I'm not fully awake yet.
Re:New line of business (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New line of business (Score:4, Interesting)
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Rackable didn't just acquire the SGI name - they acquired the entire company: Buildings, equipment, employees, infrastructure... everything.
In fact, not only did Rackable keep most of SGI's employees, in a rare move for a merger, most of the Rackable employees were given the pink slip; Rackable's old manufacturing facilities were closed, and SGI's were kept. It's pretty safe to say that the current SGI is the "old" SGI for all intents and purposes.
SGI had more than a few troubled years from 2000-2008; the m
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No such dice. "Society Leeches of America" would be misleading, people could think you want to appear as if you're Congress.
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They become Capital Holdings companies
Re:Fear not, rest of world. Patent trolling is pro (Score:5, Funny)
So patent trolls are terrrrrists? Interesting theory, let's see...
Hate us for our freedom to produce and innovate? Check.
Cripple the economy? Check.
Try to influence politics by their practices? Check.
I think you're on to something here...
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Each other, surely? Or do things get *really* bad?
This makes me sad (Score:2, Interesting)
I was hoping SGI would at least somewhat gracefully fade away, instead someone decided to do a cash grab before the remnants of a once-great company finally disappear...
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This seems to be the norm these days - a company that was formerly massively successful begins to die down and fade away, so in a last ditch attempt to cling to live they sue anyone and everyone that has ever done anything remotely similar to them.
Going by this logic, it does also mean that Apple must be ready to die soon. I mean, they can't have that much money, can they?
Re:This makes me sad (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems to be the norm these days - a company that was formerly massively successful begins to die down and fade away, so in a last ditch attempt to cling to live they sue anyone and everyone that has ever done anything remotely similar to them.
Every successful company usually becomes that way under a founder. Or a founder-like figure (maybe the company was obscure for 100 years and then takes the world by storm - the leader in this case is like a founder). Under the founder all is well, and the company generally makes net-positive contributions to society.
Then the founder retires, and his hand-picked successor takes over. They usually start having more of an eye towards whatever the founder hired them for (often marketing, or finance, or whatever). However, they were mentored by the founder and usually are fairly true to the original dream.
After that the next succession is managed by the board's CEO search committee, and everybody after this could care less about visions and dreams, and instead aim to min/max their balance sheet and bonus check. Companies don't sue people - their leaders do. By the time a company reaches the state SGI is in, nobody who had anything to do with creating anything of worth is in charge.
Going by this logic, it does also mean that Apple must be ready to die soon. I mean, they can't have that much money, can they?
Every company is doomed to follow this cycle - it is the nature of wall street. Apple is now operating under the hand-picked successor. He will probably do reasonably well, but one day he will retire. Everything after that will be inertia. Oh, it takes a long time for a huge company to fail, and sometimes you get lucky and the wall street pick might actually turn out to be visionary. However, by-and-large the only innovations at Apple starting with the next CEO will be in the balance sheet.
Sooner or later you can only cut the bottom line so much before the fall in the top line starts. At that point the company will bleed off anything of worth it still has left, until its only function can be that decreed by law - it is still able to collect money, write checks to the decision-makers, and file lawsuits, shielding the decision-makers from personal liability. It is nothing more than a front at that point, but it will continue on.
Apple has always been lawsuit-happy, so who knows - perhaps we won't even last another CEO before the slide starts. It all depends on whether they start rewarding the lawyers more than the innovators like they do at most companies.
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Tim Cook has already done quite a bit of innovation in the manufacturing and logistics area. He is more like a Michael Dell than a Steve Jobs but he is not just a balance sheet guy.
My prediction is that Apple goes mainstream under Cook, becoming something like IBM was in the 1980s.
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Tim Cook has already
But he's not the next CEO, he's the current one. The GP's point was that when the founder's hand-picked successor goes, that's when the rot starts.
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Yup. Like Jobs or not he clearly knew how to make a company successful. Chances are he picked a successor who is likely to have the right stuff, even if he isn't another Jobs.
It all goes downhill once the search committee takes over. They're going to pick the same kind of CEO that any committee of this sort does. If the next guy has anything to do with Jobs, the committee will have likely picked him because how much he ISN'T like Jobs. People with what it takes to make a company a big success rarely re
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I would question the idea that Jobs 'knew how to make a company successful.' He had a particular knack for making one company successful. Which is more of a 'fate' thing that anything else. Jobs had quite a few fairly unsuccessful ventures after first leaving Apple and before returning. And he would not, ever, be the sort of person who could immerse himself into any random company and make it successful. His success was in a particular niche of a particular industry. His success was more of a quirk th
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Oh I see. I buy that.
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I shudder at the thought what will happen to our economy should Microsoft and Apple start to become obsolete...
I don't dare to think about IBM.
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I was hoping SGI would at least somewhat gracefully fade away
I was hoping for a comeback- not like this, though.
Wait wait wait wait... (Score:2)
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Yes.
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Sigh. Independent claim 7 doesn't even have a geometry processor. Filed in 2011, so it's not like it was a good idea from way back.
It's hard to see how this differs from one of their own cited prior arts patent, US7518615, which contains, for example:
> 1. A computer system, comprising: a processor for performing geometric calculations on a plurality of vertices of a primitive; a rasterization
> circuit coupled to the processor that rasterizes the primitive according to a scan conversion process which o
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Its a continuation patent, so I suspect it inherits the filing date of the original patents in exchange for a shorter duration.
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Sigh.. won't somebody please think of the rasters?
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US 7518615 is NOT prior art. It is a different patent based on the same original application as this patent. It's common to split patent applications into multiple patents during the application process to accelerate issuance of parts of the original application.
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Sure looks like some monkey business here. This patent was filed in 2011, but it's actually a filed as a continuation. Here's the critical bit:
This patent application is a continuation of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/632,262, filed Dec. 7, 2009, which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/168,578, filed Jul. 7, 2008, and entitled DISPLAY SYSTEM HAVING FLOATING POINT RASTERIZATION AND FLOATING POINT FRAMEBUFFERING, which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. N
These corporations are so cute (Score:2)
Such a gluttonous appetite for money; they remind me of two sea cucumbers trying to devour each other.
Look at the patent date (Score:2)
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Good (Score:2)
Keep on suing each other, boys! Sue, sue, sue! That'll teach you a lesson!
shitty patent (Score:3)
really. using 16 bit floating point to hold color.
"yo we patented opengl with 16bit floating point in the 2000's". should be fucking obvious. increasing it to 32bit and 64bit too and other number holding formats.
Re:shitty patent (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:shitty patent (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort of. 32 bits is not obvious. The IEEE standard for this stuff is actually pretty fucking complicated once you realize how much numerical analysis goes into the design. IEEE standardized on a set of formats, and half float is just a variant on those (e.g. the exponent bias is still 2^(E-1)-1). I templatized this for a compiler once - you could have a float with any number of mantissa bits and any number of exponent bits. Shit, should have patented it.
Plus, this patent is not a patent on half float, it's a patent on using floating-point AT ALL within a GPU. Talk about homesteading the noosphere :)
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Shit, should have patented it.
Just publish it so no one else does.
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It's just floating point with a different size mantissa/exponent. Not creative or novel in any meaningful way. Certainly not worthy of a patent.
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32 bits is obvious. The half precision floating point format was actually quite neat. It's pretty much useless for anything except graphics, but with 16 bit floats you can represent a far more useful range of colours (for humans) than with 16 bit integers and get a rendering quality that is much closer to 32-bit floats than to 8-bit integers. Maybe not deserving of a patent, but it was considered pretty clever at the time.
The latter is the standard, though. Patents aren't granted to innovative, nonobvious solutions that are sufficiently awesome to be "deserving," because that would be an arbitrary standard and would violate the requirements of due process (the PTO being a quasi-judicial body). Instead, the question is just whether they're novel and nonobvious, and if something is pretty clever, then it doesn't matter whether it cures cancer, renders better fog, or makes an online shopping experience slightly faster. Such que
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Yes, it should be, however that is not what the patent claimed.
Claim 1:
A rendering circuit comprising: a geometry processor; a rasterizer coupled to the geometry processor, the rasterizer comprising a scan converter having an input and an output, the scan converter being configured to scan convert data received at the input, at least a portion of the data received at the input being in floating point format, the scan converter being configured to output data from the output, at least a portion of the data f
Prior art (Score:2)
Enough of this (Score:2)
did anyone say prior art? ;-) (Score:2)
Look at the date on the patent. There is a massive amount of prior art. This is a silly patent and lawsuit.
Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/ [gnu-darwin.org]
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Think again, the priority date is 1998.
SGI patent portfolio (Score:2)
I don't think there is anyone who is going to question SGI's degree of innovation or importance in the industry. I'd hope that most of their patents are expired or near expired because turning the company into a patent troll is like necrophilia, defaming the body of the dead to satisfy the living. That being said, there could be a lot of innovations there we all take for granted and this could be really harmful. I sincerely hope that they lose while being very afraid they'll win.
Re:SGI patent portfolio (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think there is anyone who is going to question SGI's degree of innovation or importance in the industry.
What the fuck am I reading? Did you read their patent?! There's a big difference between being Innovative, and being the first iteration. It's sure great to be the latter, but it shouldn't grant you monopolies over the iterative shit you do. You, sir, are seriously WRONG. I, for one, question SGI's degree of "innovation" considering it was primarily obvious iteration. Furthermore, I put it to you that if SGI didn't exist, someone else would have done it just as well, possibly even better. Ergo, they weren't at all more important than the next guy.
"Genius" isn't. Hey, what's the symbol for an ingenious idea? A light bulb? Edison's "invention" was iterative. Two years prior there was an improved incandescent light in a vacuum patent in the European patent office... It wasn't some remarkable leap of insight, Edison just tried stuff until it worked! Elisha Gray and Gram Bell BOTH invented the telephone i.e. using mercury as a variable resistor to put voice down the line that we were already using for communication (telegraph) -- Bell was AN HOUR sooner to the patent office, Gray went to the poorhouse. It was clearly ITERATION. People knew that you could detect sound waves and people knew you could communicate via wire. Are you saying that the twain would never have met if it weren't for a single Marvellous Brilliant Genius? WRONG! If the problem is important enough it WILL be solved (if it's solvable). SGI was first. SO WHAT. Edison was first to make a marketable bulb. We'd still have incandescent bulbs today if he had been struck and killed by the fabled lightning... We'd have had the Telephone AN HOUR LATER if Mr Bell had never existed.
We've increased the population of humans H in the problem space to the point that any monopoly on an idea nearly immediately harms independent "inventors". The average technician skilled in the art has a chance of creating the solution S. The number of new ie "patentable" solutions P to a problem in a given time interval T is P = SH/T
It's plain to see that as H increases, so to does the number of patentable solutions.
( This is because THERE IS NO TEST FOR OBVIOUSNESS -- The PTO does not employ individuals adequately skilled in the arts [these folk are WORKING in their fields]! Consequently, the PTO just ensures that the forms are signed, grants patents over anything that's not already in their Database and let's the court sort it out )
The problem is that there are actually VASTLY more people just getting shit done and realising that their work is iterative, than there are dumb lazy fucks who can't think for themselves so they look through the patent system database to see who's ideas they can use -- THE LATTER DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST! Everyone just solves their own damn problems rather than pay Patent Tax! The system is useless! Since EVERYONE is some degree of a Genius, Geniuses aren't special, otherwise we would actually search for patented solutions to use. In some fields where the research cost is high, you may do this, but in Software?! It's just Math, and Math is EASY.
Patents reward investment in research OF ONLY THE FIRST RESEARCHER. It's moronic to think that an idea monopoly won't harm THE ENTIRE REST OF THE FIELD as they're taxed for not getting there first or have to work around an obvious solution to avoid legal fees to invalidate P. It's even more retarding to get on your knees and worship the first iterating company as if it's the ONLY one in the field because it can pay for more H to produce P in less T. If you can pay for more H, then you get more P in less T; It's quite simple.
The bar for "Genius" has been lowered to average Joe engineer. It's your style of Mental Fellatio that's to blame for our current state of affairs...
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OK lets list some innovations of theirs:
first use of integrated frame buffering for graphics
first use of multibus which brought the price of workstations down to the $5k-10k level capable of doing work like real time audio
first use of floating point accelerator technology for graphics
first use of multiple hardware graphics accelerators
first system capable of handling 3 video streams simultaneously, essentially inventing video mixing.
most of the ideas from ACE are used in today's supercomputers.
Now the rest
This is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of the stupidest patents I've ever heard of.
Even back in the fall of 1986 at University of Saskatchewan in my graphics class, the algorithms we started with were presented as floating point algorithms. We were then shown the integer variants on those algorithms, which we were told bluntly were used only because they were faster than floating point emulation.
So they got a patent for doing something that we were told not to do purely for performance reasons, not for any reason of logic or functionality. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind this whole patent should be overturned.
And, yes, I was heavily into computer graphics at the time. I even was a contributing publisher to a paper on the "Fast Line Clipping" algorithm, which really, in retrospect, was not so much an innovation as an example of a very advanced special case of loop and conditional unrolling that some of the more advanced modern compilers can probably to automatically at this present time. If you want to check out that crufty old article, you'll have a better chance of finding it by searching for Yang or Pospisil, the professor and grad student for the project; I was just a fourth year programmer at the time.
No, we didn't patent our algorithm. Back then the point of research and development was to learn and share, not to squat and sue.
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This is one of the stupidest patents I've ever heard of.
This statement is equally valid for all software patents. There is nothing in this software patent that is any stupider than anything in any other software patent. They are all equally stupid, and should never have been granted to begin with.
All it took to bring this country's creative innovation to a screeching halt was one stupid appeals court decision that math and algorithms were patentable.
The New Pawn brokers (Score:2)
They buy a property low and then milk it for all they can get. They are true red neck entrepreneurs. Patents are there to protect the creators/inventor and their family to make a reasonable profit on the idea for a limited number of years. What the "owner"/"entrepreneurs" have done is take that idea, bundle the IP as a commodity and buy and sell it on the secondary market. Very different than the intent of the law and creates a system that does not favor the inventor. Much like the pay day loan business
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When do we get the reality TV show!? "Pawn Stars -- USPTO" and "Pawn Stars -- Wall Street". We've already seen plenty of activity from both and it's popular as ever! There's plenty of nuts doing the work to make the show interesting too. Gotta sell this crap to the History channel fast!
Not SGI, nor can it claim to be "formerly SGI" (Score:4, Informative)
The claim that "Graphics Properties Holdings" is the former SGI is wrong.
SGI still exists, and has nothing to do with "Graphics Properties Holdings."
SGI had a troubled history in the dot com bust, and sold off many assets to keep itself afloat. SGI stopped making their own graphics hardware years ago; a number of patents were sold at the time, apparently a few made it to patent trolls. The current "Cray" was another case of SGI selling the trademarks and brands to Tera Computer Company - SGI kept most of the Cray engineers.
Silicon Graphics Inc. then died a slow death, going into bankruptcy twice before being bought by Rackable, which kept most of the SGI employees, and renamed itself SGI.
SGI still exists more or less unchanged from the SGI of yesteryear (though without MIPS, IRIX, or graphics workstations) - and is not part of "Graphics Properties Holdings."
An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Insightful)
You've only read the damn abstract haven't you?
How many times do people have to say READ THE CLAIMS before it sinks in that the abstract normally only gives an example and the patents claims normally go far beyond that. In some patents the abstract comes close to being completely misleading. Incidentally the claims are not restricted to 16 bit floating point representations or any other size of floating point accuracy, plus it's a continuation of other patents, so don't forget to read their claims too.
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As I said: "SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides a display system and process whereby the geometry, rasterization, and frame buffer predominately operate on a floating point format. Vertex information associated with geometric calculations are specified in a floating point format. Attributes associated with pixels and fragments are defined in a floating point format. In particular, all color values exist as floating point format. Furthermore, certain rasterization processes are performed a
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So...they've patented a particular combination of mantissa/exponent size for floating point numbers?
Exactly how low can the patent office go?
Previously sued ATI (Score:3)
Re:Previously sued ATI (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an interesting article from Nov 2010 Embattled Silicon Graphics Portfolio Now On The Warpath [gametimeip.com]
Yesterday, thanks to PriorSmart‘s Daily Litigation Alerts, I noticed Dell, HP and Lenovo all targeted in the same Delaware patent lawsuit by Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. The titles of the two patents at issue were both “Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering” (6,650,327 and 7,518,615). It sounded a bit familiar, so after a little searching, I found out that, sure enough, just a few days before the same company filed suit on the same 2 patents against Apple, Nintendo, Sony, Toshiba and Acer in the Southern District of New York. That said, I still wasn’t satisfied that I had correctly identified the source of my recollection. (You don’t often forget a term like “rasterization.”)
After a little more searching, I came across an older case, Silicon Graphics v. ATI Technologies, which had gone to trial in Madison, Wisconsin in 2008. The case was a close to a total loss for SGI, with Judge Barbara Crabb ruling that co-defendants ATI and AMD did not infringe the ’327 Patent, and that both defendants were authorized for certain uses under a license to Microsoft. So why are these new lawsuits being filed, and who is Graphics Properties Holdings? Graphics Properties is essentially what’s left of SGI after filing bankruptcy last year. (That’s right, again.) As for why these former SGI patents are now being asserted again, a court of appeals decision from earlier this year may help explain. Chief Judge Rader, in a unanimous opinion, undid just about everything that Judge Crabb had done.
Because the district court erroneously construed two of the three contested limitations in the ’327 patent this court vacates the summary judgment on claims with those terms. This court also determines that the district court erred with respect to the effect of the Microsoft license on direct infringement. * * *
[As a result,]this court vacates the district court’s non-infringement ruling and remands for consideration in light of the correct construction.
In other words, because Judge Crabb misinterpreted the meaning of critical terms in the patent, the ultimate conclusion of non-infringement was incorrect. Specifically, the phrase “a rasterization process which operates on a floating point format” was interpreted by Judge Crabb as requiring that the process “as a whole” needs to operate on a floating point format. It was undisputed that the accused products performed some rasterization processes on a floating point format, but others using fixed point values. Based on this construction, Judge Crabb (correctly) concluded that the accused products did not exactly match the claimed invention.
However, on appeal, Judge Rader noted that the specification recites a number of different rasterization processes, and that the patent claim uses the indefinite article a when describing rasterization on a floating point format. The correct construction, according to Judge Rader, is that “one or more of the rasterization processes (e.g., scan conversion, color, texture, fog, shading) operate on a floating point format.” Because it was also admitted that some of the rasterization process did use a floating point format, a judge simply can’t deny the patent holder its opportunity to prove infringement of the patent to the jury.
The contrast between these two constructions is dramatic, as potential design around opportunities for Judge Crabb’s narrower interpretation are significantly easier than for Judge Rader’s broader construction. Having emerged from this first battle with a broader interpretation of the patent claims, Graphics Properties has apparently decided to turn up the heat and pursue an even broader class of targets, including PC and game console manufacturers, and to do it on multiple fronts.
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Informative)
If someone told me "we need a system that can faithfully render analog reality on a digital display device" I would naturally assume, as we all have been doing for centuries, that we would need to approximate color and location as closely and as accurately as possible. The word "accurately" seems to require the use of floating point numbers.
So, I tend to think it's obvious even back then. That "pong" did not look like a real ping-pong table with a real ball and a real paddle was not a problem of imagination, but one of technology not having advanced far enough yet. The use of floating point math in generating display information has been in practice for a very long time and if you were to include students making graphs based on math which uses floating point numbers, then you can go back much further.
These "on a computer" patents are crap just as much as "on the internet" patents and "with a can opener attachment added" patents are.
What they have patented is a "system or process" (software) which models what people have been doing for a long, long time. Sorry, but I just don't think that's a good basis for a patent. Invent something that people CAN'T do and you've got a patent.
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Funny)
Round corners©
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I don't even know if you need to go that far. IANAPL but the patent seems to shoot itself in the foot, both by claiming people already do floating point rasterization in software, and by pointing out how the industry is waiting with bated breath for chip prices to come down enough for hw floating point rasterization.
Hence isn't that an obvious next step for someone "knowledgeable in the field" or however that is phrased?
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would appear this is a continuation on other patents, with the original being filed in 1993.
So tell me, twenty years ago was this obvious to any of the users here? Or is it obvious now only because they "invented" it?
I wrote assembly code for working with 16-bit floats on the Atari ST back in the 1980s. I don't remember the exact number of bits in mantissa/exponent but it's just a case of picking something that works for for whatever it is you're doing.
For use in frame buffers? It's pretty damn obvious IMHO...everybody in the entire graphics industry has always known that 8 bits is only just good enough to represent color for the human eye. Many workstations had more bits and you even used to be able to buy PC graphics
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Software floating point emulation is not prior art to this patent. The text of the patent explains why.
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Software floating point emulation is not prior art to this patent. The text of the patent explains why.
To be patentable, it can't be obvious. The text of the patent basically says that hardware is now fast enough to do what couldn't be done before:
"But as advances in semiconductor and computer technology enable greater processing power and faster speeds; as prices drop; and as graphical applications grow in sophistication and precision, it has been discovered by the present inventors that it is now practical to implement some portions or even the entire rasterization process by hardware in a floating point f
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The text of the patent basically says that hardware is now fast enough to do what couldn't be done before
It's not even about speed, it's about being able to get enough transistors on the die.
Transistor size shrinks, that's a given. Transistor budget increases as a direct consequence and adding floating point is the obvious evolutionary path for graphics.
When most graphics programmers saw the first floating point frame buffer I imagine there was much more "Finally!!" than "Whoah, dude, I never saw that coming!". This is what makes it unworthy of a patent, not that nobody ever did it before because they were lim
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would appear this is a continuation on other patents, with the original being filed in 1993.
So tell me, twenty years ago was this obvious to any of the users here? Or is it obvious now only because they "invented" it?
No it's not "only obvious because they invented it." They didn't "invent" anything, as it's an utterly straight-forward (as in it basically duplicates other IEEE FP formats) application of long established practice with different (but "obvious") parameters.
Sure it's a good idea to do that—but you can't patent "good ideas," remember? Oh wait, with today's new "income oriented" patent office you can...
[And that's the problem with many other idiotic patents these days—they're basically "exist
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Give me a break. This is like patenting any mathematical formula. It's a ludicrous patent.
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Here's the abstract! Look at how unpatentable it is!
You have to read the claims. Not just the abstract, but the claims.
Oh, yeah? Here's the summary! Look at how unpatentable it is!
Once more... The claims - they're the numbered paragraphs starting a few pages before the abstract. Only the claims have any legal weight. The rest - including the summary you quoted - is merely to provide context.
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Actually, the claims only have a certain level of legal weight. The actual patent is granted on the "Description of Invention" -- the main body of the patent. That's the part the PTO reads and analyzes against prior art. The claims are generally only checked against the body, to ensure they're supported by the body, and I'm sure, not written too outlandishly.
Now, once you're in court, it's the claims that are used to prosecute infringement. But they'll be challenged, or even tossed out, if they aren't prope
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Actually, the claims only have a certain level of legal weight. The actual patent is granted on the "Description of Invention" -- the main body of the patent. That's the part the PTO reads and analyzes against prior art. The claims are generally only checked against the body, to ensure they're supported by the body, and I'm sure, not written too outlandishly.
I'm sorry, but that's simply incorrect. And, yes, I am a US patent attorney. The PTO skims the description, but prior art searches are performed explicitly on the claim limitations. In fact, if your description includes material that's not in the claims (and you file no divisional or continuation applications claiming said material), it's considered to be dedicated to the public.
Now, once you're in court, it's the claims that are used to prosecute infringement. But they'll be challenged, or even tossed out, if they aren't properly backed up by the body of the patent, once you get to trial.
It is correct that the claims must have proper support in the specification (35 USC 112), but novelty (35 USC 102), obviousness (3
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So, interesting question. A friend of mine, who worked for a while at Sun, and a while at Apple, late 80s, early 90s, both places on or near the graphics system, did the experiment of recompiling their graphics libraries (NeWS at Sun, I think it may have been QuickDraw at Apple) to use floating point. I can't tell, from reading the patent whether this is prior art, or not (a floating point frame buffer?) or if this work was ever published beyond talking to friends.
This was back in the days when Apple sold
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Nothing innovative about using floating point arrays for a pixel element frame buffer nor for operating on the pixels with various algorithms. Not patentable.
I don't know if I agree with the first claim, I don't think floating point was "obvious" when first invented, however long ago that was. However s10e5 is called out in IEEE 754, and has been in use for over a decade. This patent is dated 2011. Either it should be rejected because it's already in practice everywhere before it was filed, or it should be
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Look at the priority clause in the patent. It goes back to 1998. That is where you need to start looking for prior art.
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What is claimed is: 1. A rendering circuit comprising: a geometry processor; a rasterizer coupled to the geometry processor, the rasterizer comprising a scan converter having an input and an output, the scan converter being configured to scan convert data received at the input, at least a portion of the data received at the input being in floating point format, the scan converter being configured to output data from the output, at least a portion of the data from the output being floating point data; and a frame buffer coupled to the rasterizer for storing a plurality of color values in floating point format.
and
7. A rendering circuit comprising: a rasterizer for performing a rasterization process, at least a portion of the rasterization process performed in a floating point format; and a floating point frame buffer coupled to the rasterizer for storing a plurality of floating point color values.
Now, if you can prove those two things to be obvious, then the patent will be invalidated. However, to me it doesn't seem any more obvious than
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the description is the basis for granting the patent, it's the part that actually matters. The claim matter, too, but in a different way. They're calling out parts of the invention description that the inventor claims are unique. But the patent is granted on the basis of the description, not the claims.
I don't know why you think that. Andrew Tridgell did a good talk about how to read patents, and it was covered on Slashdot. [slashdot.org] Maybe you missed it.
Only the claims matter, and for purposes of invalidating a patent, only the independent claims matter. See for example, this explanation [danshapiro.com], and this more boring one [google.com] (look for IIA).
You just wrote a whole lot of text that is completely wrong. You might want to consider where you got that information, and modify your method of collecting information so it doesn't ha
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Insightful)
But I read the claims and they are ludicrous. They basically state if you implement/use math in a specific manner, you are owned by us. And that is besides the obviousness to use floating point instead of integer/fixpoint (actually, integer and fixpoint approximations were created to overcome slow hardware). Once hardware is fast enough, you most often move to the more precise solution; there is nothing inventive about that, but a natural evolution.
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Informative)
They actually say exactly that in the patent itself:
In an effort to gain the advantages conferred by operating on a floating point basis, some prior art systems have attempted to perform floating point through software emulation, but on a fixed point hardware platform. However, this approach is extremely slow, due to the fact that the software emulation relies upon the use of a general purpose CPU...
But as advances in semiconductor and computer technology enable greater processing power and faster speeds; as prices drop; and as graphical applications grow in sophistication and precision, it has been discovered by the present inventors that it is now practical to implement some portions or even the entire rasterization process by hardware in a floating point format.
In other words, they admit that they've seen prior art where others have tried and failed. Instead of inventing a faster method for implementing floating point, SGI just waited until silicon caught up, and hey look, they "invented" floating point graphics. It's in the patent text that they did nothing but wait for Moore's law to solve their problem for them! How was this approved by the patent office!?
I have this mental image of a lone clerk in the patent office somewhere, mindlessly whacking a rubber stamp on everything shoved in front of his face, while staring off into the distance with glazed-over eyes.
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Insightful)
They actually say exactly that in the patent itself:
In an effort to gain the advantages conferred by operating on a floating point basis, some prior art systems have attempted to perform floating point through software emulation, but on a fixed point hardware platform. However, this approach is extremely slow, due to the fact that the software emulation relies upon the use of a general purpose CPU...
But as advances in semiconductor and computer technology enable greater processing power and faster speeds; as prices drop; and as graphical applications grow in sophistication and precision, it has been discovered by the present inventors that it is now practical to implement some portions or even the entire rasterization process by hardware in a floating point format.
By the same method I could patent an electric car that has a 500-mile plus range, top speed of over 90mph and a charge time of under an hour. When the hardware catches up (i.e. other people do the real work) I cash in as having invented it. God, what a stupid system. No wonder people want to be lawyers rather than actually invent something - the lawyers can claim to have "invented" it on paper and take the money and credit.
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By the same method I could patent an electric car that has a 500-mile plus range, top speed of over 90mph and a charge time of under an hour. When the hardware catches up (i.e. other people do the real work) I cash in as having invented it. God, what a stupid system. No wonder people want to be lawyers rather than actually invent something - the lawyers can claim to have "invented" it on paper and take the money and credit.
You could do that yes, but it would cost you a fair amount of money. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313050823AAND484 [yahoo.com]
But then not all patents stick when they are challenged in court so filing a single patent on your "invention" does not guarantee any return. In order to be sure you actually shaft the real inventor of an electric car you will need to invest probably in the region of $100,000. This is quite a lot of cash to invest, and even then there is a small chance that some bastard w
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:5, Funny)
I have this mental image of a lone clerk in the patent office somewhere, mindlessly whacking a rubber stamp on everything shoved in front of his face, while staring off into the distance with glazed-over eyes.
And then this lone clerck in the patent office comes up with the theory of relativity. I know, right?
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Why do I suddenly get the idea that someone went and came to patent the idea and that clerk didn't like him...
It sure is material for a Hollywood blockbuster thriller.
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It's been done. Here's the prior art:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrsN8iTwFiw [youtube.com]
Re:An cue the standard reply (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember that SGI had a strong partnership with MIPS and jointly developed a lot of video and audio technology. They might very well have also invented the silicon.
Lets not treat SGI like a patent troll with fake claims. This was a company that did a lot to advance our industry it is a pity of our law that bankrupt companies can have their memories tarnished this way.
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That and the fact that they are still getting license money from hardware vendors for OpenGL patents (as I understand it, you pay for these when you buy a graphics card). For this reason I question the validity of the patents for some vendors (I think Apple pays for using OpenGL in software, as well). Perhaps they are attacking Apple's non-OpenGL graphics or something, but I still suspect they are paying for the license already.
As for obviousness, I don't know. All workstation graphics I used in the early t
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Good point about floating graphics. SGI was in the early 1980s one of first companies to make use of hardware floating point acceleration as a standard. Up until the 80486 math coprocessors were rare on PCs (and I believe the 80486sx which was the most common 486 didn't have one) and I don't even know when they had multiple floating point units.
I think it is getting more clear this is a quite likely legit patent claim. And then it comes down to what people think about patents in general.
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It WAS. All of that has now been jettisoned as the company flamed out. The remainder is a non-practicing patent troll.
The people who actually did the cool things got disgusted years ago and formed Nvidia.
N64 by SGI (Score:2)
Haven't we had graphics using floating point numbers since like, the Nintendo 64 days?
Nintendo 64 had an SGI chipset. It was essentially a stripped-down SGI workstation in the same way that the original Xbox would be a stripped-down PC. This patent is owned by the remnants of SGI that weren't sold to Rackable.
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They couldn't find a market? SGI was a huge player for many years 1981-1999 they were usually the 2nd or 3rd biggest workstation company in the USA. I used to joke about Apple during the 10.2-10.4 days "bringing SGI technology to the masses".
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I don't think this will be a serious crimp. Most likely it would be a licensing fee that all the mobile chip makers end up paying. So like an extra $3 per phone for years.
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The patent clearly can't cover all uses of floating point, and even the patent authors clearly understood this. But claims, as always, try to suggest they cover everything.
In truth, a patent covers a specific way of doing something. So assuming there's no other reason to judge this a bad patent, you still have to look at exactly how they implemented their floating point solution in hardware. For example, some fragment of SGI went after ATi some years back, and the court rejected the '327 patent as not apply
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Graphics Properties Holdings != SGI.
SGI still exists, so claiming that it is "formerly SGI" is a load of crap. It's about as absurd a claim as to say that they are "formerly Microsoft," or "formerly Sun."
I seriously doubt Darl McBride works there. He was just a little ahead of the curve; the real wave is still coming.
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It happens... it shouldn't. But check out the notorious CADtrack XOR patent (US Patent 4,197,590). CADtrack was some kind of CAD company from way back, that emerged in the 80s as a patent troll. They had a patent on using the XOR operation to draw and undraw a cursor on a bitmapped screen. This should have completely failed the test of obviousness... I did exactly this as a kid of 17 on my first home computer, an Exidy Sorcerer (it didn't have full bitmapped graphics, but it had programmable character memor