The mud-fight now really has started in San Jose California, NVIDIA has filed a countersuit against Intel for breach of contract. The legal action is related to a chipset license agreement with Intel, the latter party claims the five-year old agreement doesn't extend to processors with integrated memory controllers like the Core i7 series, but NVIDIA begs to differ. An interesting snippet of NVIDIA's statement is that the GPU giant also seeks to terminate Intel's license to NVIDIA's patent portfolio.
NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it has filed a countersuit in the Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware against Intel Corporation for breach of contract. The action also seeks to terminate Intel's license to NVIDIA's valuable patent portfolio.
NVIDIA's countersuit was brought in response to a filing by Intel last month in the Delaware court, alleging that the four-year-old chipset license agreement does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as its Nehalem processor.
"NVIDIA did not initiate this legal dispute," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. "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."
NVIDIA entered into the disputed agreement in 2004 to bring platform innovations to Intel CPU-based systems. In return, Intel took a license to NVIDIA's rich portfolio of 3D, GPU, and other computing patents. NVIDIA had been attempting for more than a year to resolve the disagreement with Intel in a fair and reasonable manner.
