PCI Prefetch Legal Issue: Will Apple Reduce Performance Level of Old Macs?

Couple of weeks ago, we were reporting, of a potential financial and/or technical issues related to illegal usage of patented PCI prefetch function by NVidia in its PCI-based motherboards.
OPTi announced to have won a similar legal action against Apple concerning functions used by the company in its chipset during the pre-Intel era. (PPC)
If Apple is forced to followed NVidia, Cupertino will have to release Firmware update for all PCI-based Mac models (including notebooks: iBook and PowerBook), from roughly 1996 till Intel transition! Thankfully, current PCI-Express-based computers are not affected by those legal decisions.