Nvidia works on Intel chip, as their dispute continues

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 28 August 2009, 19:39 IST
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Bangalore: Nvidia has started working on a companion chip to go with Intel's latest processor design, says a report on Chinese Website HKEPC. This development comes after Intel recently alleged in a lawsuit that its chipset agreement with Nvidia does not extend to Intel's future generation processors. In February this year, Intel's lawsuit alleged that the four-year-old chipset license agreement with Nvidia does not extend to Intel's processors with integrated memory controllers, such as its 'Nehalem' Core i series of processors. Nvidia filed a lawsuit against Intel in March in response to the suit filed by Intel. The countersuit sought to terminate Intel's license to Nvidia's patent portfolio. Nvidia entered into the now-disputed agreement with Intel in 2004. In return, Intel took a license to Nvidia's portfolio of 3D, GPU (graphics processing unit), and other computing patents. Nvidia and Intel have said that they had been attempting for more than a year to resolve the disagreement between them, but it looks like the discussions have not borne any fruit till now. Despite the report's claims, it is not yet clear whether Nvidia would actually bring out a chip before the legal issue is settled with Intel. Nvidia believes that the PC has become a GPU-based platform as much as a CPU-based platform and that Intel is trying to delay that expected shift by using the lawsuit. Intel manufactures CPUs and the chipsets that goes in the motherboards to which those CPUs connect. Nvidia makes GPUs, and it has licensed chipset technology from companies like Intel and AMD to make its own chipsets that support each CPU vendors' processors.

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