14 DAY TRIAL // The battle between two of the world's largest chip makers marches on, as NVIDIA countersued Intel on Thursday, claiming a breach of contract. According to the graphics chip maker, NVIDIA, Intel made a series of misleading statements meant to undermine the former's licensing rights. As a result, NVIDIA now seeks to end Intel' access to its graphics processing related patents, as well as to patents related to three-dimensional computing.
NVIDIA's legal action comes one month after Intel filed a complaint in the Court of Chancery against it, claiming that its latest Nehalem chips are not covered by the four-year-old licensing agreement between the two companies. Immediately after Intel quietly took legal action against NVIDIA, the graphics chip maker responded, saying that at the base of Intel's move was the fact that it realized “CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU,” according to Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA.
In the latest legal action between the two companies, NVIDIA is claiming that Intel has “manufactured” the licensing dispute as part of a “calculated strategy to eliminate NVIDIA as a competitive threat.” As far as the latter is concerned, the graphics chip maker is fully confident that the licensing agreement continues to interact with Intel's latest generation of processors.
As a result, NVIDIA now wants to terminate Intel's licensing rights to its patents related to graphics processing and three-dimensional computing. The graphics chip maker also says that the lack of a licensing agreement between the two companies affects Intel's line of integrated graphics chips, which are in violation of NVIDIA's patent portfolio. In a recent news-story on Reuters, NVIDIA says that, “Having breached the contract and irreparably injured Nvidia, Intel has lost the right to continue to enjoy the considerable benefit of its license to Nvidia's patent portfolio.”