Now there’s a shock
In time-honoured fashion, graphics giant NVIDIA has met Intel's recent legal action against it with a counterattack of its own.
The origin of this dispute concerns a licence NVIDIA has to produce chipsets (called MCPs by NVIDIA) for Intel CPUs. On 18 February this year Intel initiated legal proceedings, claiming the license does not extend to "any Intel processor that has integrated memory controller functionality, including Intel's ‘Nehalem' architecture."
Intel and NVIDIA had been trying to resolve this between themselves and Intel apparently decided this wasn't going to happen so it took the dispute to the courts.
As seems to be the way with legal matters, NVIDIA has now countersued. It has published a redacted version of its court filing here (as well as Intel's original court filing here) and, after addressing the original complaint, lists its counterclaims.
The introduction starts robustly: "Intel has manufactured this licensing dispute as part of a calculated strategy to eliminate NVIDIA as a competitive threat," it says.
The introduction to the counterclaim goes on to claim that Intel is doing this because its own integrated graphics can't compete with NVIDIA's so "Intel is now using this lawsuit to tilt the playing field decidedly in its favour." It also reminds us that Intel still wants to retain its own rights to NVIDIA patents under the 2004 agreement.
