Grant Gross
Senior Writer

Intel files countersuit in Transmeta patent case

news
Jan 11, 20072 mins

Claims Transmeta was dishonest in describing its own patents and violated several Intel patents

Intel has filed a countersuit against Transmeta in an ongoing patent infrongement disagreement between the two companies.

Transmeta first sued Intel in October, saying Intel’s Pentium and Core PC processors violate 10 Transmeta patents. Intel, in a court document filed Tuesday, denied it had infringed any Transmeta patents, instead accusing Transmeta of infringing seven of its own patents.

Intel’s claims cover a variety of patents on processor functionality, including power usage and packed data. Transmeta’s patents aren’t legitimate because Transmeta officials “withheld, concealed, and/or mischaracterized” information about other patents and technologies in their patent applications, Intel lawyers wrote in the counterclaim filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Instead, Transmeta infringed Intel patents that came before the Transmeta patents, Intel lawyers wrote.

Transmeta won’t have a comment on the Intel countersuit until it can study it further, a Transmeta spokesman said.

Nine of the 10 Transmeta patents in the October lawsuit cover basic processor functions like scheduling and addressing instructions on the chip.

Transmeta, founded in 1995, targeted Intel’s market dominance in the notebook PC market. Transmeta developed software that reduced power consumption, allowing PCs to run longer, but its processors did not gain a large market share. Intel recently has focused on lowering power consumption as well.

In its first nine years of business, Transmeta, based like Intel in Santa Clara, California, posted $650 million in losses. In 2005, the company switched business models and now focuses on licensing its technology. In November, Samsung Electronics unveiled a converged computer and mobile phone that runs on a Transmeta processor.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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