In an interview with Digitimes, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang speaks out against Intel and reveals NVIDIA’s plan to support VIA processor on Ion platform. Intel has filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA, asking the court to stop NVIDIA from producing chipsets that are compatible with any Intel processor that has integrated memory controller. However, NVIDIA believes that it has license to produce chipset for Intel’s processors.
“The disagreement is over that fact that they (Intel) don’t believe we have the right to design chipsets for CPUs with integrated memory controllers, which we do,” said Huang. “NVIDIA entered into an agreement in 2004 in order to being platform innovation to Intel CPU based systems, and in return, Intel took a license to our rich portfolio of 3D, GPU, and other computing patents.”
NVIDIA is not able to understand why Intel took the hostile action of filing a lawsuit, even though NVIDIA hasn’t announced any disputable products. According to Huang, the trigger point to the disagreement appears to have been NVIDIA’s announcement of the Ion platform for Intel Atom processor.
Few months back, NVIDIA announced their new Ion chipset designed for Intel Atom processor and it is largely believed that Ion chipset will take away market share from Intel’s own chipset that it offer with Atom processor. As the Ion chipset has better graphics performance for around the same cost as Intel’s chipset.
Huang said he is confident that the courts will ultimately find that the current license agreements does give NVIDIA rights to produce chipsets that support Intel CPUs with integrate memory.
In the interview Huang also confirmed that NVIDIA would launch an Ion platform supporting VIA technologies’ Nano CPU in second half of 2009. While the Ion platform with Atom support will focus on $299 to $500 price range, the Ion platform for VIA will be for low cost netbook/nettop models. NVIDIA and VIA have already demoed a working model at Computex 2008 that used the Nano processor with GeForce 9400 chipset.
[Via Digitimes]