Parallel Processing sues Sony

By Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief -- Electronic News, 7/27/2007

Let the games begin.

Parallel Processing Corp. filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against Sony, claiming the popular Playstation 3 is infringing on a 1991 patent for synchronized parallel processing with shared memory.

Parallel Processing, based in Newport Beach, Calif., is a spinoff of International Parallel Machines of New Bedford, Mass., which obtained the original patent. That patent addresses true parallel processing through synchronization of the logic and system calls, which has never been fully utilized in client machines because it was too difficult to write general-purpose applications to take advantage of it.

Playstation 3, however, is based on a parallel computing design that in the past has been relegated to supercomputers. The technology has never found a home on desktop or notebook computers, despite a slew of startups that attempted to commercialize the technology in the early 1990s.

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