14 DAY TRIAL // About a month ago NVIDIA filed a complaint in the US International Trade Commission (ITC), as well as a lawsuit in the Delaware District Court, because certain Samsung products infringe some of its own GPU patents.
Today, the company announced that ITC has given the green light to NVIDIA’s initial complaint and has decided to investigate the claims of patent infringement.
“We are pleased with the ITC decision today to open an investigation and look forward to presenting our case on how NVIDIA GPU patents are being used without a license,” said David Shannon, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at NVIDIA.
NVIDIA has also released a list of devices that are at issue at might be blocked from entering the United States because they infringe these GPU patents owned by the company.
The list is pretty impressive and contains some of the most powerful smartphones and tablets launched by Samsung on the market. The list also contains some devices that haven’t been released on the market yet.
Here are some of the smartphones at issue according to NVIDIA: Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4. The following tablets may be banned from sale as well: Samsung Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro and Galaxy Tab 2.
Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali and Imagination's PowerVR GPUs are at issue
The reason why NVIDIA wants to block these products from entering the United States is the fact that they are using Qualcomm’s mobile processors, such as Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801 and 805.
However, Qualcomm doesn’t seem to be the only chipset maker accused of infringing NVIDIA’s GPUS patents, as the company claims that Samsung's own Exynos mobile processors may be subject to ban as well.
MediaTek chipsets don’t seem to be part of the patent infringement claim by NVIDIA, but Samsung doesn’t really use these SoCs into its Android devices.
While this doesn’t mean that the Samsung smartphones and tablets mentioned earlier will be automatically blocked from entering the United States, it’s a sign that there may be some truth in NVIDIA’s claims.
It remains to be seen how the things will escalate and how fast the investigation will advance in the coming weeks. Samsung Galaxy Note 4 should be officially launched in the United States next week, on October 17, so we doubt NVIDIA will be able to block the shipments until then and delay the launch of the phablet.