Intel Takes NVIDIA to Court, NVIDIA Responds

Santa Clara, California-based Intel filed a complaint on Monday, in the Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware, against graphics chip maker NVIDIA, according to which Intel is negating that the four-year-old chipset license agreement between the two companies doesn't extend to Intel's future generation of CPUs. More precisely, Intel is saying that NVIDIA has no valid license for making chipsets that can support Intel's future generation of CPUs, with “integrated” memory controllers, such as the Nehalem. On that note, NVIDIA has recently responded to Intel's claims, saying that it trusts that the license is valid.

 

“We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.”

 

The agreement between the two companies, which was signed back in 2004, has enabled NVIDIA to bring significant innovations to the Intel CPU-based systems, such as SLI, Hybrid Power, the CUDA parallel processing technology, or the Ion. In return, Intel has taken a license to NVIDIA's portfolio of 3D, GPU and other computing patents. However, it looks as if Intel doesn't want NVIDIA near its next-generation of computer processors, especially since the global leading chip maker is expected to debut its first CPUs with integrated GPUs.

 

On the other hand, Intel's actions seem somewhat justifiable, as NVIDIA’s latest technologies, especially the Ion platform, have managed to provide improved performance for products that were previously powered by Intel technologies. In addition, Intel's recent actions only come to confirm rumors that surfaced last year, according to which, NVIDIA had been refused the right of designed chipsets with support for Intel's latest high-end Core i7 processors.

 

Huang further explained his view on the matter, saying that it was not surprising that Intel was initiating a dispute over a contract signed four years prior to the event, given that innovations such as Ion, SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA threaten Intel’s ability to control the PC platform.