Azul Systems and Sun have settled the "chip multithreading" patent suits they've had aimed at each other since a year ago March, but nobody knows what the settlement deal is - and it might be nice to know whether Sun got a piece of Azul like Azul claimed in its suit Sun wanted.

Sun general counsel Mike Dillon said on his blog Tuesday that the "specific settlement terms are confidential (not uncommon in a case like this) but they are favorable to Sun. I think it's likely that Azul had a change of heart about the case once they viewed some particularly damaging evidence that was provided in discovery."

Azul claims Sun had "to give a little bit on their position."

An industrious Register thinks Azul's "little bit" involved turning over shares to Sun. It found amended incorporation papers dated June 18 increasing the number of E shares. On the basis of the timing it bets they went to Sun.

Azul of course is the start-up run by Stephen DeWitt, who sold Sun the Cobalt Networks pig-in-a-poke for $2 billion in 2000, a transaction Sun wound up writing off so you know there's bad blood between them.

Azul pulled the pin before Sun did last year and went to court looking for absolution of the patent infringement claims it said Sun was holding over its head, either that or a finding that Sun's patents were invalid. It said Sun wanted to be paid for things like lower-level cache, multithreading, fault tolerance, latency and speculation, concurrent shared objects, distributed processing and garbage collecting.

Sun then reciprocated with a patent infringement/trade secrets misappropriation suit. Azul did after all have a bunch of ex-Sun people working for it.

Azul is the outfit with the so-called Java-dedicated "shared network" appliances built these days out of 768 processing cores on 16 Vega 2 processor chips with 768GB of memory.

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