A jury verdict is expected any day in one of the labyrinth of lawsuits bewteen Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc: this is the one where Intel accuses AMD of copyright infringement of Intel microcode in the Am287 maths co-processor – hardly a leading edge product these days, which shows how just long this one has been meandering through the courts; Intel alleges that its 1976 second-source agreement with Advanced Micro allowed the latter to publish the 80287 microcode for compliance purposes, but not to use it in chips; if the case goes against AMD, the company says it will have to rewrite – reverse engineer – the microcode used in its forthcoming Am486 parts.
