Intel Needs NVIDIA's Patents

It seems that Analysts are under the impression that Intel may have to sign a new agreement with NVIDIA in order to be allowed to use their patents, as its chances of successfully competing against AMD on the market for HPC accelerators may be too low otherwise.

With all the so-called 'battles' happening between Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, analysts have been especially mindful of each of their marketing strategies.

For instance, just a short time ago, analysts concluded that Advanced Micro Devices was not going to compete on the workstation market.

On the other hand, it was found that the Sunnyvale, California-based outfit was quite bent on putting a good show in terms of HPC-aimed accelerators.

Currently, the HPC accelerator battle is being fought between AMD's FireStream Series and NVIDIA's Tesla collections, both based on GPUs.

Now that Intel aims to enter this segment, analyst are, naturally, looking into what it would need to make a successful incursion.

Basically, UBS Securities found that Intel has no HPC accelerator IP portfolio of its own, or at least not enough to make a visible difference, except for its Larrabee attempt that may or may not still contribute to anything,

As such, in order to battle AMD's integrated graphics and parallel processing, it needs NVIDIA's patents.

Currently, NVIDIA and Intel are on arguably uncertain terms what with their long battle over the former's right to make chipsets for Intel chips.

As such, in order to move quickly on the HPC front, Intel will have to settle with NVIDIA and sign another cross-license agreement.

“Given the current regulatory backdrop, we expect Intel to avoid the public scrutiny of a trial that could cloud its access to Nvidia’s graphics and parallel computing patents, and may therefore settle with Nvidia,” reportedly said Uche Orji, an analyst with UBS Securities.

Intel's Knights Corner, its first HPC accelerator with highly-parallel processing capabilities should show up in 2012.