Arctic Cooling Reportedly Plans to Sue AMD for Fusion Trademark

From X-bit Labs: Arctic Cooling, a well-known supplier of power supply units (PSUs), cooling systems and other PC accessories, has reportedly decided to sue Advanced Micro Devices in a bid to prohibit the chip company from using Fusion name to describe its chips that integrate x86 processing cores with Radeon stream processors on the same piece of silicon.

Arctic has been using Fusion brand to sell its power supply units for some time now and first applied for registration of the trademark back in early 2006. According to Heise.de web-site, Arctic attempted to negotiate with AMD, but the latter continues to use the word "Fusion" to classify its initiatives and products. The maker of PSUs, coolers and other products believes that usage of "Fusion" trademark infringes its rights.

While Arctic may own rights for the Fusion trademark, it is hardly unlikely that AMD will be ordered to stop selling its popular Fusion chips since it is pretty hard to prove that buyers acquire processors instead of PSUs or wise-versa. In fact, the industry knows a lot of examples when the same trademark is used for different products. For example, Art Lebedev studio sells Optimus keyboards, LG Electronics ships Optimus smartphones and Nvidia Corp. calls its power consumption optimization technology as Optimus.

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