15-year-old parallel processing patent threatens Sony, PS3

Sony has been hit with yet another patent infringement lawsuit. This one targets the Cell processor, the brains of the PlayStation 3. A company that claims to be located in Newport Beach, CA, Parallel Processing Corporation, filed suit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas alleging that the Cell infringes on a patent for "synchronized parallel processing with shared memory."

The patent in question, number 5,056,000, was filed in November 1989 and issued in late 1991—back in the days when the Intel 486 and the Motorola 68040 were the bleeding edge of personal computing while the NES and the Sega Genesis represented the pinnacle of console gaming. It was originally filed by International Parallel Machines, which later assigned the patent to Parallel Processing Corporation.

Searches of corporate filings in California, where the company is based, and Delaware, where the complaint says it is incorporated, turned up no trace of Parallel Processing Corporation. In fact, there are no references to the company at all on the Internet aside from mentions of this story, leading us to assume that this is not a technology company, but a partnership organized just for the purposes of litigating this case. The patent itself is potentially juicy and could be construed to cover important aspects of programming parallel machines very broadly. At the time that International Parallel Machines received the patent, CPU technology was not at a point where the patent could be easily monetized.

What often happens in such cases is that the patent stays on file until it's rediscovered and evaluated as a potential source of licensing revenue. Whenever small companies have such potentially valuable patents on file, they'll often either sell them or license them to an enterprising group of patent lawyers who can litigate them. From what we can surmise, this appears to be what happened in this case. The originating company, IPMI, may not have had the resources to litigate the patent itself, so it is possible that the company licensed it to a group of lawyers who set up a corporation specifically for the purpose of exploiting this patent.

Given certain aspects of the patent, it is conceivable that this could become the Eolas of parallel processing—as the patent could be construed to cover certain critical aspects of modern parallel computing—to the point that it affects every company that dips its toes in the parallel-processing waters, including IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD. Speaking of IBM, it's a bit strange that Parallel didn't go after Big Blue first. After all, IBM designed the Cell and sells it in any number of blade servers. Perhaps Parallel was daunted by the difficulties another company has had in extracting a settlement from IBM.

Sony has been the subject of more than a couple of patent fights related to its consoles. Best known is the Immersion case, which most observers believe was responsible for the rumble feature not making it into the PS3 controller. Filed in 2002, the case was finally settled earlier this year for $82 million. More recently, a US firm that manufactures and sells thin film alloys for optical discs accused Sony of infringing on a patent with the manufacture and sale of Blu-ray discs.

Parallel Processing Corporation seeks trebled damages, attorneys' fees, and an injunction preventing Sony from future infringement. Of course, a fat settlement check from Sony would also be nice, and if the company is indeed a patent troll, such a check could give it enough of a war chest to pursue the likes of IBM, Toshiba, and even Intel.