NVIDIA Strikes Back (At Intel)

Posted on Mar 27, 09 12:07 PM PDT

You might have followed the NVIDIA/Intel licensing drama, so here’s the second round. Context: Intel and NVIDIA entered an agreement in which NVIDIA could make motherboard chipsets compatible with Intel's Front Side Bus (FSB, the piece that connects the processor with the rest of the system). In return for the license, NVIDIA granted Intel accesses to its patent portfolio. Recently, Intel said that this agreement does not cover Intel's new Core i7 CPU.

NVIDIA's argument is that if it is not entitled to build chipsets for Intel's future CPUs, Intel should not be allowed to continue to use NVIDIA's intellectual property in their products. As we said before, we're not lawyers and we have no idea how this will be interpreted by a judge, but NVIDIA’s counter-argument is interesting and could be a strong leverage, especially if it has short-term repercussion on Intel’s integrated graphics, a key feature in the popular low-cost segment. Without knowing the implementation details of Intel's graphics chips, so it's hard to tell how bad it would hurt if the court sided with NVIDIA's. However, it is fair to think that if Intel granted the FSB license (they resisted for a while), Intel probably needed the patents.

Link: NVIDIA's filing

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