News

Intel and Nvidia in licence spat

CPU chip giant Intel to take Nvidia to court over chipset licence.

18 Feb 2009

Intel, the CPU manufacturing company, has filed a lawsuit against graphics maker Nvidia in a disagreement over a four-year old licence pact.

The agreement permits Nvidia to produce chipsets that are compatible with Intel CPUs but Intel is claiming that this did not include processors with an integrated memory controller, such as Intel's current flagship processor, the Core i7.

If upheld, this would mean that Nvidia would have to come to a new agreement with Intel, a potentially costly exercise, and one that would be particularly galling for it, if it believed that its current agreement is valid.

Intel claimed that it had been trying to resolve the matter out of court for some time. "Intel has been in discussions with Nvidia for more than a year attempting to resolve the matter but unfortunately we were unsuccessful. As a result Intel is asking the court to resolve this dispute."

Nvidia president Jen-Hsun Huang hit back stating that his company was, "confident that our license, as negotiated, applies." Huang has been quite outspoken over the past year when it comes to Intel and again pulled no punches in his statement. "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."

Recently Nvidia announced the Ion chipset platform for Intel's Atom processor, claiming that it offers superior performance for budget notebooks than Intel's own chipsets.