Nvidia files countersuit against Intel
Nvidia has filed a countersuit against Intel following February's initial filing from Intel which disputed the four-year-old chipset licensing agreement the two companies signed. Nvidia believes it's part of a wider scheme to take Nvidia out of business.
This comes in response to Intel filing suit against Nvidia a few weeks ago over the companies’ four-year-old cross license agreements, which Intel says don’t extend to CPUs with integrated memory controllers.
“Nvidia did not initiate this legal dispute,” said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, “but we must defend ourselves and the rights we negotiated for when we provided Intel access to our valuable patents. Intel’s actions are intended to block us from making use of the very license rights that they agreed to provide.”
Looking through the two filings (Intel / Nvidia – both PDF), one part of the dispute appears to be over an article published on bit-tech last August following an open discussion with Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing for Nvidia’s chipset business, where Petersen made it clear that Nvidia’s chipset license with Intel was valid for processors using the new Quick Path Interface. Intel claims that the statement given by Petersen was false because Intel believes that Nvidia doesn’t have a bus license for processors using an integrated memory controller.
In the countersuit, Nvidia denies the allegations put forth by Intel before moving onto its counter claims, which begin stating “Intel has manufactured this licensing dispute as part of a calculated strategy to eliminate Nvidia as a competitive threat.”
Later on, the counter claims allege that Intel will attempt to prevent Nvidia from making chipsets for Nehalem based processors [such as Arrandale and Clarkdale] without an integrated memory controller. Nvidia continues the offensive by claiming that it has been informed and believes that Intel “is planning other means to prevent Nvidia from enjoying its license to make chipsets for [Arrandale and Clarkdale] CPU products.” These include the integration of the GPU onto the same substrate as the CPU for “no material or technical benefits” but in order to “make it difficult, if not impossible, for Nvidia to connect its MCP chipset to the CPU.”
Nvidia also alleges that it has been informed that “Intel has other plans, both technical and strategic, that are designed to interfere with Nvidia’s license and disadvantage Nvidia in the marketplace, which may include improperly encrypting its buses, or degrading the performance of the buses.”
In summary, Nvidia believes that “Intel’s conduct represents further breaches of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Whether it be by public repudiation of the license, or bad faith gaming of the technology, Intel is plainly preventing Nvidia from enjoying licensing rights that it bargained for while, at the same time, making full use of its cross license to Nvidia’s patent portfolio.”
This legal spat could be a lot bigger than we first thought, but again it is difficult to quantify how big this might be without seeing the license agreements or the filings in full. It’s quite possible that Intel is using Nvidia technology in its X58 chipset, for example, in order to achieve optimal SLI performance on the platform. At the time when I was first informed of Nvidia’s decision to license SLI technology to the X58 platform, Tom Petersen explained to me that the chipset supports peer-to-peer writing which is almost exactly the same as the PW short technology Nvidia introduced with the NF200 switch chip.
If the agreements are cancelled, Nvidia may look to not only prevent Intel chipsets from supporting SLI by locking them out at the driver level, but to also seek to have its peer-to-peer writing technology disabled if it is part of the cross licensing agreement between the two companies. Neither option would be good for consumers, just as having a sole chipset supplier for Intel processors wouldn’t be good for consumers. But ultimately, this isn’t down to what is right for consumers, it is down to what rights both Intel and Nvidia have with regards to the two license agreements they signed in 2004.
How do you think this is going to play out? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyThey are just playing this back and forth, aren't they?
The reasoning that the license that Intel has given does not extend to processors with integrated memory controllers is a load of shite IMHO. Intel makes processors, and licensed nVidia to build chipsets for it. Does nVidia need a new license for every innovation that Intel does? Does Intel need a new license every time nVidia
buildsrebrands a new graphics card?Intel have, as Xtrafresh says, been overly aggressive - not just with nVidia, but with AMD last week as well.
There must be a reason behind this sudden aggression - why alienate two technology partners when their technology is integrated into your own offerings? - but I'll be buggered if I can work out what it is.
Intel and Nvidia would make a much more powerful duo than AMD And ATI!
Maybe that's a bad thing. Considering a monopoly. :-/
It's either shutting AMD and erVidia out, going for bigger marketshare, or positioning themselves for a quick profit through new license deals.
I have a theory f my own. I think they are doing the former, and want to hurt AMD and reVidia as much as they can before entering the graphics market with Larrabee. Since Larrabee is x86, it would make perfect sense for Intel to want to shield that from ATI. They also keep nVidia out of their platform. If i was CEO of Intel, i would not be scared of a forced split, i would just split off Larrabee and keep kicking reVidia and AMD/ATI in the nuts.
Intel is going to try to conquer the world!!! Lock your doors and close your ports.
This might just drive AMD/ATI and nVidia to play nice with each other and maybe combine to come out with some nasty platform or something
Maybe it isn't that simple...
Intel wants to enter in the high-end VideoCards market, i think this was mentioned days ago, and ofc preventing nVidia from making chipsets will make things easy for Intel.
personally i think this is great for us the costumers, having more players in the high-end videocards business means cut in prices and new technology, and having AMD/ATI already producing both processors and videocards, i have no doubs nVidia soon will be making their very own x86 processors :D, ich lso means cut in prices for this technology.
Its amusing to watch Intel with all this power-control-over-all hungry, attacking nVidia in one side, attacking AMD in the other side. Time will tell how this tunrs out. But all we hope the best result for us.
Intel's previous forays into the graphics arena have been none too stellar to-date, remember they're talking about GPUs integrated onto the CPU die, not a standalone graphics card. Because it cuts nVidia out of the motherboard graphics arena entirely (GPU on CPU die means there's no option to use nVidia or ATI integrated graphics; it's Intel or nothing), I don't see how this can be a good thing for the end-user generally, especially since a CPU-integrated GPU is unlikely to match the power of a separate GPU option.
And if Intel have complete control of the integrated graphics market (on Intel platforms, anyway), I don't think that's going to mean cheaper prices at all. Indeed, because Intel is going to be offering more on a single die, I'm sure they'll use that as an opportunity to increase prices, not decrease them.
As I said above, I think Intel are up to something. I just don't know what, yet.
i'm sorry? integrating the GPU onto the same die as the CPU has no technical benefits? or is that meant to translate to "profit for nVidia"?
any credibility nVidia might have held for me over this countersuit died with that comment
also, if nVidia choose to block out SLI on Intel chipsets at the driver level (and they can't develop any QPI chipsets) then nVidia are only hurting their own sales, as the only multi-GPU setups available on intel boards will now only be ATI and Intel. Its a market nVidia -need- to exist in, for their own sake
I think that it is Intel's plan to marginalize Nvidia, let it know that it's the horse in the relationship, as it is now about to become the only company without a top to bottom computing solution(CPU, Chipset, GPU). Nvidia dug itself a nasty looking grave, by being a bully and alienating it's customers. VIA looks like Nvidia's only shot at holding a power seat in the upcoming years, but any sort of collaboration between the two seems ill fated.
You cant ignore they have plans for stand alone videocards, and we cant denied this a plan for future Intel projects without nVidia in the way.
Now with this, waht we have in front of us is a producer of CPU's, chipsets and videocards, obviusly looking to compete and gain the market of AMD/ATi, that's why i see there must be a cut in prices, maybe they will throw some ultra high prices at first, but given the great performance of the latest AMD/ATi there has to be cuts.
I see nVidia being the one with big problems, and again i bet they are in a hurry for get in the race of the x86 proccessors and step up.
ARM is getting into the net err... ultra-portable segment now so Intel should not bank on x86 living forever here. That would be very stupid.
I really don't get what Intel wants with this debacle.
i highly doubt MS will drop x86 for whatever reason, for the simple fact that Microsoft was made on x86. It's where their entire product base is (you could say "excluding console and mobile" but it's a given that everyone with an xbox or windows mobile also has a windows machine), and to move to another architecture will render every piece of software for a windows system unusable (face it, emulation won't cut it, especially for games, and its highly doubtful many companies will recompile their software - previous and current - for the new architecture)