Continuing its campaign to squeeze every last buck out of its vast collection of patents, IBM Corp has now pointed out that it holds over a dozen patents on the concept of reduced instruction set computing – adding that its collection represent the vast majority of patents filed on RISC – and that it has another 100 or so pending. It wants royalties ranging from 1% to 5% of sales from all makers of RISCs, and while the demand is not likely to cause problems for the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co, which has copious cross-licence agreements with IBM, or for Sun Microsystems, which likely already pays top whack on other IBM patents it uses, the demand could prove embarrassing for small companies like Acorn Computers Plc with the Acorn RISC Machine, and perhaps for chipmakers like Cypress Semiconductor making versions of Sun’s Sparc.
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