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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

While this might be true from a legal standpoint, even using a competitor's presentation for the description seems a bit lazy, and getting caught at it is quite embarrassing. It implies that nobody at Intel can describe a modern processor very well.

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It's a common tactic in patents in my experience. You're not going to sue yourself. So you describe your invention in the context in which a competitor would use it. Of course, this would typically be coupled with a disclosure to the examiner that the thing describing the context is in the prior art.

Intel is citing AMD as prior art. It isn't lazy. It's necessary background.

Engineers don't write the text of patents, patent attorneys do. And for the kind of boilerplate in a patent like "describe a modern processor", this text and images are actually quite likely to itself be heavily copy-pasted from previous applications.

Honestly, I would be more surprised if any engineer (intern or otherwise) at Intel ever noticed that the images came from an AMD presentation, let alone actively participated in copying the images from said source.

As the inventor on twenty-something patents, I think you're understating how much input engineers have. Yes, the bulk of the work is done by patent attorneys, mostly translating from pure technical jargon into that weird mixture of jargon and legalese that patents are written in ("...of the one or several..." and "...such as but not limited to..." and all that rot). However, for a patent of any complexity this often involves multiple rounds of back-and-forth with engineers to clarify and ensure correctness. In fact, I'd argue that any engineer who isn't involved in the writing process is failing to be sufficiently diligent or act in good faith when they sign the part about the patent accurately reflecting the invention.

Ian Cutress (discussed elsewhere in these comments for also having his description of a CPU copied in the patent) suspects it's an intern[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1511716678199132173

With proper citation, what's the issue with an article being quoted?

It's definitely lazy that they didn't create their own description, but how does it follow from this that they can't?

If it's published, it is prior art.

They are not trying to patent what's shown in the figures, those are just given as background information. A patent for a screwdriver will most certainly also describe screws, regardless of whether screws are prior art.

Patentability is solely a matter of the claims made at the end. Those claims will of course be interpreted in the context set out by the method description, but it is entirely normal for a patent to describe the state of the art before discussing a novel method (about which actual claims are then made).

(IANAL)

It's still blatant copyright infringement at least.

IANAL but I would have thought that referencing material for prior art would have fallen under fair use.

Yeah, to me it just implies they don't want to actually leak any confidential information about their architecture since those details aren't really relevant to the patent (which is about snooping cache line zeroing in a cleaner way), so they just described their competitors overall uarch. Stealing lines from an anandtech article is a line to far though IMO.

Patents are generally not written by engineers. They are written by patent attorneys / outside consultants. The engineers have a few conversations with the attorneys, and share technical material (in this case, something specific about cache coherence). The attorneys/consultants then generate a hundred pages of patent-ese scaffolding.

The plagiarized content:

1. Is not what is being patented here.

2. Is not created by Intel engineers (or likely even Intel employees). They're busy designing chips.

> It implies that nobody at Intel can describe a modern processor very well.

This seems like a bit of a stretch, given that Intel had a lead in CPU power for years and is still quite close to AMD.

Designing a modern CPU architecture and describing one to a non-expert audience are very different skills.

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