Acer Laboratories Inc (ALI) has signed a deal with Intel Corp to manufacture chipsets for the Pentium II, III and Celeron processors. A subsidiary of the Taiwanese Acer Group, ALI is giving Intel a royalty and rights to some intellectual property of its own in return for access to the P6 Bus microarchitecture. A chipset is a collection of chips that reside on a PC’s motherboard, usually consisting of the CPU, memory, BIOS and peripheral controllers, among others.
The deal comes hot on the heels of Intel revoking a technology license for Taiwanese chip design house Via Technologies Inc and slapping the company with a federal lawsuit. Via has been a vociferous supporter of the PC133 and double data rate DRAM memory standards. Intel’s preferred next-generation memory standard is Direct Rambus DRAM. Intel’s lawsuit states that Via continues to mislead customers…to believe that unlicensed Via chipset products are licensed to Intel.
