What Intel didn't expect was that it would have to pay $2.175 billion in damages for infringing semiconductor manufacturing patents. (That's about half of Intel's fourth-quarter earnings or about 14.23 billion yuan.) It is one of the largest patent infringement settlements in US history.
In Waco, Texas, a federal district court ruled that Intel had infringed two patents held by VLSI Technologies Inc. The court awarded Intel $1.5 billion for one patent and $675 million for the other.
Intel denied patent infringement, but the court rejected the claim. Intel also claimed that one of the patents was invalid because it involved Intel engineers' work, but the court did not accept that argument.
One of the patents in the case was reportedly awarded to Freescale Semiconductor as early as 2012, and the other to Sigmatel in 2010. Freescale later acquired Sigmatel. NXP acquired both patents in 2015 after acquiring Freescale Semiconductor.
The two patents were transferred from NXP to plaintiff VLSI in 2019, according to the information.
Morgan Chu, a lawyer for VLSI, said the patents contained new inventions that could improve processors' performance and speed, two crucial indicators of competition in the market.
The much-anticipated Rocket Lake 11 desktop CPU has been confirmed for release by Intel on March 17.
According to foreign media reports, Intel has confirmed that the Rocket Lake CPU family will be officially announced as early as 8 a.m., March 16. On this day, Intel will allow the media to reveal the full information of its 11th generation family, which will include CPU specifications and prices.
Intel will also open pre-orders for the 11th generation of its family on the same day, allowing partners and retailers to promote the chips officially.
Rocket Lake S, the 11th generation desktop processor, will remain confidential until March 30, 2021, at 6 a.m. PT / 9 a.m. ET.
The 11-generation Core is still a 14nm process from the current situation, but with the new architecture, the single-core performance will advance by leaps and leaps. It is not a problem to beat the Zen3 architecture Ryzen 5000 series, but it will not be too far ahead, and the multi-core performance will be entirely behind; after all, it only has eight cores and 16 threads at most.
Only the i9, i7, and i5 series of Rocket Lake 11 are new architectures, while the lower-end i3, Pentium, and Celeron series are all examples of Comet Lake 10 Core's increased frequency.
According to the latest news, these batches of i3, Pentium, Celeron will not be classified into the 11th generation family sequence; the models will still belong to the 10th generation i3-10305 i3-10305f, i3-10105, i3-10105f, and so on.
The price of the Rocket Lake 11 generation desktop CPU is as follows:
Core i9-11900K: $599.99
Core i9-11900KF: $579.99
Core i9-11900: $509.99
Core i9-11900f: $479.99
Core i7-11700K: $484.99
Core i7-11700KF: $454.99
Core i7-11700: $389.99
Core i7-11700f: $359.99
Core i5-11600K: $309.99
Core i5-11600KF: $279.99
Core i5-11600: $264.99
Core i5-11500: $234.99
Core i5-11400: $214.99
Core i5-11400f: $179.99
