Intergraph Corp’s Clipper RISC chip is now no more than a distant memory to most people, but Intergraph obviously remembers it, and, presumably encouraged by the success of Digital Equipment Corp with the Alpha, has filed a lawsuit against Intel Corp in the District Court of Birmingham, Alabama. The suit alleges that Intel coerced Intergraph into relinquishing certain patent rights concerning the Clipper. Intergraph said the patents involved were to do with the chip’s cache memory management, and claimed they are at the heart of the entire Pentium family of processors and systems, including the Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors. In a statement, the company said that Intel ended a harmonious multi-year business relationship with Intergraph when it sought to acquire the rights to Intergraph’s patents at no cost. When Intergraph refused, the complaint says Intel undertook a systematic campaign of coercion and oppression against Intergraph. The Huntsville, Alabama company is claiming monetary damages and injunctive relief to prevent Intel from continuing anti-competitive behavior. The decision to file suit was a difficult one, said Intergraph CEO Jim Meadlock given our formerly warm relationship with Intel and our dependence upon Intel CPUs in our workstations, PCs and servers. But, he said, Intel was cutting the company off from product information and support, escorting competitors into its accounts, and trying to obtain rights to its intellectual property. The Clipper, acquired by Intergraph from Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1980s, was one of the earliest of the merchant RISC chips, though by 1990 Intergraph had given up trying to sell it on the open market, and was using it solely for its own workstation and server lines. It began a transition to Sun’s Sparc chip, before embarking, with Intel’s co-operation, on an attempt to establish a line of Intel- based technical workstations in 1993. That market only started to take off this year as Microsoft’s NT became a viable operating system, encouraging both Compaq Computer Corp and Dell Computer Corp to launch their own workstations. รก