Sony sued over Cell Processor
by highlandcynic
Sony is once again the subject of legal action this time directed at the Cell processor that forms the heart of the PS3. A company called Parallel Processing Corporation, previously unknown, has filed a case against Sony claiming the Cell infringes on patent 5,056,000. A patent, which was originally filed in 1989 and granted in 1991.The suit says the Cell infringes on the patent covering “synchronized parallel processing with shared memory.” Parallel Processing Corp of California wants triple damages and the impounding and destruction of all offending product. One of the puzzling aspects of this is that Sony is only one of three companies that were involved in the Cell project, with Toshiba and IBM. It’s puzzling since IBM clearly designed the processor and designed the reference platforms for Cell, and sells its own line of blade servers based on Cell.
What makes things more interesting is the company suing didn’t exist until June 15, 2007.
For more, please see Ars Technica and CVG.
HighlandCynic’s Opinion
The patent in question essentially describes a linearly scaling parallel processor. The terms of the patent are extremely broad; for example, “A high speed computer that permits the partitioning of a single computer program into smaller concurrent processes running in different parallel processors.”
That could describe any multi-core/multi-processor architecture since about 1970. Actually, the Cray super computers of the 1980s had a design remarkably similar in concept to that of the Cell processor itself. I graduated with my Comp Sci degree in 1990, and reading the patent reminded me of so many of the things covered during my studies that I dug out an old text book. High Performance Computer Architecture by Harold S. Stone (who works for IBM at the Watson research center in NY and was made a fellow of the IEEE in 1987), published in 1987. Sure enough, there are algorithms for parallelizing tasks by breaking them up into small pieces and synchronizing the results. The book is a hardware book, and describes various hardware methods for obtaining high performance, including parallel processing. You can Google Stone’s work and find lots more at the IEEE or the ACM.