The INQUIRER Top Five Intel legal spats

THE CURRENT legal ramifications surrounding the EC and Intel are hardly the first time the chip giant has consulted its learned friends. In fact, Intel has spent more time with its briefs than Jeffrey archer. Allegedly. So here's a bunch of appearances we recently caught up with thanks to the rather fine daytime TV Crown Court repeats.

5. Remember Transmeta? Last year, the one-time Next Big Thing filed suit against Intel, suggesting power-efficiency and other elements of its architecture had been co-opted. The world went on turning.

4. In 2004, Intel settled a long-running saga with Intergraph over intellectual property. Intergraph bagged a cool $225 million.

3. At the Computex trade show in the early 1990s, Cyrix cheekily created banners marked “Cyrix Instead” as a riposte to “Intel Inside”. Intel told Cyrix to pack it in, pronto. Cyrix packed it in, pronto. At the same show, a Cyrix employee was spotted drinking cobra blood in Taipei's infamous Snake Alley. In an unrelated incident, Cyrix was later acquired by National Semiconductor.

2. In the early 1990s, a court ruled that the x86 numeric naming convention didn't belong to Intel. AMD was allowed to use the term 486 and lo, Pentium was christened as the child of “pente”, Greek for five, and “-ium”, a suffix suggestive of critical ingredients.

1. In the 1980s, Intel had granted several chip makers the right to provide alternative sources for chips then fell out with AMD. Allegations against Intel included the suggestion that documentation was spoiled but eventually AMD was granted the ability to reverse-engineer the 386. They don't seem to have got on since… µ