Palo Alto, CA-based OPTi Inc. has announced that a jury from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled in the company's favor in the patent-infringement trial between it and Apple Inc., originally filed in 2007. The suit relates to OPTi’s U.S. patent No. 6,405,291, entitled “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.” According to OPTi, the court previously ruled that Apple had infringed the respective patent.

A report issued by OPTi reveals that the jury ruled on the following four issues:

– In the matter of willful infringement, the jury ruled that Apple willfully infringed OPTi’s patent;
– In the matter of Apple’s defense that OPTi’s patent was invalid due to obviousness, the jury ruled that OPTi’s patent was valid;
– In the matter of Apple’s defense that the patent was invalid due to anticipation, the jury ruled that the OPTi’s patent was valid;
– In the matter of damages, the jury awarded OPTi $19 million for Apple’s infringement of OPTi’s patent.

“The Apple lawsuit is a part of the Company’s strategy for pursuing its patent infringement claims relating to its Predictive Snooping technology,” the OPTi report reads. “Consequently, the outcome of the Apple case, and any subsequent appeal, will play a role in the Company’s strategy for pursuing its patent infringement claims and the Company’s ability to realize licensing revenue from its Predictive Snoop patents. There can be no assurance of the extent to which the outcome of these rulings will lead to positive results in the Apple case or the Company’s overall licensing strategy,” OPTi says.

The patent, issued in June 2002, describes a method to efficiently transfer data among the CPU, memory, and other devices. That description states that, “When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes.”

As the (abstract) description continues to outline, “The controller then allows the burst access to take place between secondary memory and the PCI-bus master, and simultaneously and predictively, performs an inquire cycle of the L1 cache for the next cache line. In this manner,” OPTi explains, ”if the PCI burst continues past the cache line boundary, the new inquire cycle will already have taken place, or will already be in progress, thereby allowing the burst to proceed with, at most, a short delay. Predictive snoop cycles are not performed if the first transfer of a PCI-bus master access would be the last transfer before a cache line boundary is reached.”

A report over at neoseeker claims that Apple initially attempted to have the suit and patent thrown out due to “prior art and obviousness.” However, the jury found Apple guilty of patent infringement, ordering the Mac maker to pay precisely $19,009,728 to OPTi, as a “reasonable royalty for infringement.” The same news piece reveals that OPTi terminated its usual business in 2003 to focus on similar lawsuits against AMD, Broadcom, Silicon Storage, SMSC, VIA, and other companies. Seemingly, the suits are currently the company's sole focus.