University of Wisconsin wins patent claim against Apple
Apple's A7 SoC turned heads when it launched at the heart of the iPhone 5S, including some at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), a patent-licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. WARF filed a lawsuit in January, 2014, alleging that Apple had infringed on one of the foundation's patents. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin heard that lawsuit in a jury trial, and the verdict is in: Apple did infringe on WARF's patent.
The patent in question was awarded in July 1998 for a type of branch prediction logic. The patented technology helps a CPU avoid mispredictions during out-of-order execution for instructions that would normally depend on data from earlier computations. According to the patent documents, the logic ...