COMMODORE SUES IBM, HP, MIPS AND SUN OVER RISC PATENTS Commodore International, the Pennsylvania-based maker of the Amiga and PC clones, today announced a patent infringement suit over RISC designs. The suit claims that IBM's 801 chip set, the original processor for the failed RT range, used core technologies orignially patented by Commodore's MOS Technologies division in 1978. This suit follows IBM's suits against HP, MIPS, Sun, and others regarding their infringement on IBM's RISC patents, which were recently settled for an undisclosed sum. Commodore's suit is based on MOStek's venerable chip design, the 6502, which they claim pioneered the technology of reduced instruction set computing by providing a very small number of instructions. Commodore's legal counsel, Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe released the following statement: "The MOStek design embodied the basis of all RISC chips--a low instruction count. Sure, the chip had 17 indirect addressing modes, but none of them ever worked. All the machines that used the 6502 chipset optimized their interpreters for the 90 core instructions that actually functioned--a reduced instruction set. All other RISC designs, up to and including the IBM PowerPC chipset, are entirely derivative work." When Unigram editors asked about the other key RISC feature--pipelining--the counsel indicated that they'd have to look in their briefs to answer that question. The final RISC characteristic--scalable performance--was dramatically answered by a related development. Commodore announced an implementation of the 6502 with a 1.68 GHz clock, yielding over 1 GIPS. Researchers at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople unvieled the experimental design, the first vacuum-state processor. The massively perpendicular system, code-named "the GIPper," uses more than 74,000 klystrons supplied by Korea's Samsung and Goldstar companies. The project leader for this development, Mike Rowave, indicated an important technology breakthrough, "all RISC processors have long pipelines...only this one has waveguides." Press Contact: Hugh Betcha Commodore International King of Prussia, PA 415-767-2222