Arctic to sue AMD over ‘Fusion’ branding

AMD has long been associated with the Fusion brand name. In fact when most people think of the term fusion within the world of hardware AMD’s concept of mixing a graphics part and processor onto the same chip instantly comes to mind. Yet the company Arctic is reportedly getting ready to take AMD to court over its use of fusion. Arctic claims it was using the Fusion branding on its own power supply products before AMD even developed its own fusion products. You may think, surely this is just Arctic trolling? Well you would probably be sincerely wrong, in fact Arctic successfully registered this trademark way before AMD started using it. Arctic acquired the brand name “Fusion” from Boot Up International Ltd., and its Fusion trademark is valid in Europe. Still a sizable market for AMD.

However, what’s even more interesting is that AMD doesn’t actually use Fusion as branding for its products. Its only use of Fusion has been within slogans, for example the future is fusion as seen in the image above. AMD ‘Vision’ functions as the chief branding for its APUs so surely Arctic’s claim is severely damaged by this fact. Further, AMD even renamed its “fusion architecture” to “heterogeneous architecture”. Arctic could have grounds to claim that AMD’s use of “fusion” may have hurt its brand or sales. This is one Arctic fishing expedition you don’t want to miss. Surely if Arctic are to take AMD to court for its use of Fusion then it should do the same to Gillette? Watch this space.

Source: Heise.de