🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct29.181700.7121@ichips.intel.com> rminemie@sedona.intel.com (Ronald Minemier) writes:
>
>i586 and intel586 are names that could be trademarked. one of the issues
>is that some other company can also tradmark a name like xxx586xxx
>
>
>this could be a problem to customers because the two parts may not
>actually be the same thing...close but not the same...most companies
>like their customers to get exactly what they already think they are
>getting.

Here is how I understand as the reason fro not calling the chip the i586/
INTEL586.

The i486/INTEL486/INTEL386 were, I believe, registered trademarks.  But
registering a trademark doesn't buy you a whole lot if you don't enforce
it.  Companies were advertising boxes as being "486/386/286" boxes.  This
was not new, as the industry had been doing this for years, and uProcessors
were not considered a "commodity", meaning to the best of my knowledge that
there was really no need for a trademark, because it was some kind of generic
technology name:  (like calling something a LAN, perhaps?)

So anyway, some companies were saying their boxes had an "INTEL386" in them, but
they were paying no royalties to Intel for the name, and Intel was not forcing
them to.  And the law states that since Intel didn't enforce the trademark of
INTEL386, they couldn't reasonably state that AMD was infringing with their
"AM386" part.  This also had something to do with the "commodity" view of the
uProcessor.

With this precedent set, there was no guarantee that Intel could keep the
trademark "INTEL586" and keep AMD from calling their the "AMD586".  So Intel
wants to be safe, and not put any kind of number in their part name (like
P5 for example) because AMD could call their part the AMDP5 or something, and
as far as the customer is concerned, a P5 *must* be a P5, no matter who makes
it.  In my opinion, Intel is right on this.  I see a lot of stuff on this net
about people wanting to know just how well the Cyrix486 performs, and it doesn't
perform very well compared to the 486's Intel makes, but their is no way Intel
can keep them from calling it a 486.  They could have kept them from calling
it something like "Quadrium", but Intel didn't trademark the 486 as "Quadrium".

>
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Joe