News - ASUS may sue motherboard competitors over OC Socket tech

Quote:

---

Legal finger expected to point at ASRock, MSI and Gigabyte.

---

Read more.

The day that you can wire up CPU circuits and pass that off as novel and non-obvious to an electronic engineer is the day you know the patent system is fubar for sure.

Yeah, first thing that came to mind is, if ASUS discovered this as there are clearly matching pads on the CPU side, why could other manufacturers not have discovered it independently?

...more to the point, if these were intended for use, why didn't Intel include them in the reference designs. Also, if they are 'added', Intel, being the ones who added them, would have known first. Presumably if patentable, they would have done it (if only to protect what is effectively the standard to be used by anyone using their chips from being blocked by a patent on the interface.

If there's more to the ASUS lawsuit than just the pads/pad layout (with them just being a visible part but not the secret sauce), then maybe they have a case.

According to ASUS they asked Intel about what the other pins did and Intel refused to tell them. They had to reverse engineer the socket to see what the pins did. I think they have every right to patent the socket as it was their hard work that made it happen. They wouldn't have a case if Intel did the release the information for the extra pins but they didn't.

The most interesting thing for me is that if ASUS do sue we will find out if.
a) That these are really additional power, ground pins that Asus has no way to patent as that would be Intel IP.
Or b) That these extra pins are just for testing, debugging or no-connect pins, in other words marketing BS.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by aidanjt

The day that you can wire up CPU circuits and pass that off as novel and non-obvious to an electronic engineer is the day you know the patent system is fubar for sure.

---

Don't agree, if Asus have genuinely taken the 2011 socket and extended it, then I would have said that they've got grounds for protecting that "innovation".

On the other hand, if I was buying an Asus X99 board purely for that OC feature then I'd be very worried about Intel then deciding to do something with those extra pins/pads in the future and rendering the "OC Socket" technology very broken. Or are Intel buyer going to have to check that their processor is certified/approved for "Asus OC Socket"? If so, then I wouldn't be using that tech, it's bad enough that your supposed to use "approved" memory, (which I've seldom done).

Where I will agree with you is that the whole global IP setup is pretty much broken and needs a complete overhaul. With the greatest respect to my US cousins, I suggest that the best way would be for the USPTO to be excluded, and the final agreement delivered to them as a fait accompli since their implementation of patents etc has even the Chinese looking at it and wondering what they were smoking when they drew it up.

How could ASUS extend the socket in any way? Clearly, any functionality they've discovered was already present on the processor released by Intel. As were the extra pads.

And also as I said, if ASUS have figured out what the extra pads are for, what's to stop the other MFRs doing the same? Anyone looking at the technical documents for more than a few seconds would discover there is a disparity between the number of pins on the socket and number of pads on the CPU, which would prompt curiosity.

The lawyers will be circling ready for a kill!

Although it would appear difficult for Asus to defend a patent on the pins themselves as they only make contact with pads on the processor that presumably Intel have already used if only for testing, their implementation of the connection to the sockets and what they do with it (supplying extra voltage, enabling features etc.) could be novel.

This can be sorted out by Intel almost overnight. If they officially state that 'yes these pins do allow additional performance but that they are not supported features and will invalidate your warranty' then ASUS would be screwed.

Who would buy a motherbaord that would invalidate your CPU warranty the moment you plug it in?

No, you can't just decide what pins on a package are for. If they allow different voltage supply methodology, it's because Intel designed it as such. Asus just discovered it. They haven't 're-purposed' anything.

Oh and just to be clear, a dozen or so extra pads offers no significant improvement to voltage/current characteristics; any differences improving power supply will be through configuration changes, *not* due to the physical number of contacts.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was 'Oh for (expletive)'s sake, not you as well, Asus!'

I read somewhere last week that intel had warned users with this asus socket that their cpu's wouldn't be covered by any warranty and that it was basically intels development socket and wasn't supposed to be used in mainstream computers. Sorry I don't have any more details about it but it was last week i'd read it!

Under stock settings, the socket is apparently used normally; the 'OC socket' mode is only activated when overclocking, which technically voids warranty anyway.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by watercooled

Under stock settings, the socket is apparently used normally; the 'OC socket' mode is only activated when overclocking, which technically voids warranty anyway.

---

Unless it's a 'K' series chip.