Intel and Texas Instruments have been sued by a subsidiary of patent holding company Acacia Technologies for allegedly infringing a patent relating to a process used in advanced pipeline processors.

Microprocessor Enhancement Corporation filed suit in the District Court for the Central District of California, alleging infringement by Intel's Itanium line of microprocessors and a series of digital signal processors sold by Texas Instruments.

The patent in question relates to a system used in advanced pipeline processors – which allow for multiple parts of a computer instruction to be dealt with at the same time, speeding up performance.

According to Acacia, this particular system allows for the conditional execution of processor instructions, and a later determination of whether the instructions executed should be written back to memory.

Acacia Technologies is better known for litigation over a patent relating to a widely used means of streaming audio or video files over the internet.

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