The arguments did not involve whether Apple knew about the patent, since the first phase of the trial (the one that concluded Monday evening) was not interested in determining whether infringement, if any, was willful. Instead, they did things like show the RTL, ask expert witnesses from both sides to explain the similarities and differences between Apple's implementation and the patent, and question both patent inventors and Apple engineers who worked on that part of the system. They also looked at prior work. Based on this information, the jury decided that the patent is valid and that apple did infringe.

They're currently (at least as of around noon) in the damages phase, and after they finish that, they'll move onto determining whether Apple knew about the patent or not.

It is not branch prediction or instruction prefetching, and it only makes sense for large, out-of-order cores with large instruction windows. Intel was sued for infringing about five years ago but settled out of court (and ended up paying some money and getting a license). The A7 was the first of the Apple chips that infringed; no one is claiming that any previous ones did. It was Apple that added the infringing hardware.

It's something Apple added (and it's not about branch prediction). Other ARM processors would not infringe.

It does also occur, and WARF has filed a second lawsuit a few weeks ago, I think.

WARF does pay a substantial share to the inventors: http://www.warf.org/for-uw-inv...

From the link: "20% of royalties (before expenses) will go to you [the inventor]."

The linked article is just wrong -- this is not in any way a branch predictor. It's predicting when to perform load-store speculation. The idea is that when you execute a load, you may not know whether there are any in-flight stores to overlapping addresses that are earlier in program order. If there are, once you detect it, you will have to squash the load (because it might have gotten a wrong value) and re-execute, flushing the pipeline. That's bad from a performance and energy standpoint (for the same reason branch misprediction is bad). You could always wait until you know that the load won't conflict, but that really hurts performance as well.

The innovation in the patent is that most of the squashes come from a relatively small number of load-store pairs, so by keeping track of them in a prediction table, you can get a large performance benefit for a small area overhead. The patent wasn't terribly useful in 1997 because instruction windows were small, but the authors thought that it would be once chips hit order of 1 billion transistors, which is pretty much what happened.

I'd be overjoyed to see the percentage of women in my courses get above 10%. But I don't think that changing course content should be the answer, since I don't think it's the problem. Instead, I'd blame:

1.) Lack of any experience of CS in high school. Even in schools that offer AP CS (which mine didn't), isn't it usually an elective that could just as well be filled with a language or second science course or music, etc? Since it's not a required class like math or chemistry, it's pretty easy to graduate from high school without ever even realizing computer science exists... or that you're good at it or like it.
2.) And when you get to college, who wants to have all their courses with just guys? Especially when everyone knows that CS majors are nerds? So why bother seeing if you like it? If everyone there already is a guy, then they must be better at or it something, right? Why else would it be so unbalanced?
3.) Bad advising. When I told mine I wanted to take intro to CS, because I was planning on majoring in chem and thought it might be useful, she told me I should take a humanities course instead, because I'd probably get a better grade. Luckily I decided to take it anyway and liked it enough to change my major.

And now when I try to convince friends to take the intro course (because I thought it was fun... and it could be good to know anyway), my guy friends tend to say that it sounds interesting, while my girl friends usually say something about how they'd probably fail. I think until the perception of who can take CS classes and do well in them changes, changing the curriculum or appearance of the program won't do much.