Wednesday, February 18th 2009
Intel Sues NVIDIA Over Chipset License, NVIDIA Responds
In a surprising move by Intel, the silicon giant filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA corporation at the Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware, over the chipset licensing agreement between the two companies, that allows NVIDIA to make core-logic (chipset) for Intel microprocessors. Intel's contention states that the licensing agreement signed between the two companies about four years ago, that allowed NVIDIA to make nForce series chipset supporting Intel processors, does not cover the the privileges required by NVIDIA to prepare chipsets for Intel's new generation of processors that feature integrated memory controllers.
As of now, NVIDIA does not stand at the receiving end of any legal action, since the company has no chipset products either released, or in production, that supports Intel's Core i7 series processors. The legal-spat in the making, between the two companies, may however affect NVIDIA's possible plans to develop chipset products for Intel's new 45 nm and 32 nm processors. NVIDIA on its part, defends its position, dismissing Intel's claims. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's president and CEO maintained that the license agreement negotiated earlier would still apply, though he did not miss the opportunity to affirm his beliefs that the focus on CPU being the soul (if not the heart) of the PC, is slowly yet surely shifting towards the GPU. "This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business" he said. According to the NVIDIA CEO, it is obvious that Intel fears the competition NVIDIA poses with its platform core-logic innovations, that it had to file the complaint. This spat between the two major computer hardware companies could get uglier in the days to come. The press-release from NVIDIA in response to Intel's charges follows:
NVIDIA Responds To INTEL Court Filing
NVIDIA Corporation today responded to a Monday court filing (Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware) in which Intel alleged that the four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as Nehalem. The filing does not impact NVIDIA chipsets that are currently being shipped.
"We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. "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."
NVIDIA entered into the agreement in 2004 in order 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.
Since signing the agreement, NVIDIA has offered innovations such as SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA parallel processing. ION, the most recent innovation, integrates a powerful NVIDIA GPU, north bridge and south bridge into one compact die. When combined with a CPU, ION enables a two-chip PC architecture for Intel processors two years ahead of Intel's own solution. In addition, the ION platform offers 10x the performance of Intel's current three chip design.
The industry and consumers now count on innovations from NVIDIA. Microsoft recently endorsed ION because it offers consumers the first truly affordable premium Windows experience. Late last year Apple selected NVIDIA's chipset for its entire new line of notebooks including the MacBook Classic, MacBook Air, MacBook and MacBook Pro. Today, companies like Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, Falcon Northwest, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, NEC, and Toshiba all ship exciting innovations created by NVIDIA as a result of its agreement with Intel.
Huang said that, given the broad and growing adoption of NVIDIA's platform innovations, it is not surprising that Intel is now initiating a dispute over a contract signed four years ago. Innovations like ION, SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA threaten Intel's ability to control the PC platform.
NVIDIA has been attempting to resolve the disagreement with Intel in a fair and reasonable manner for over a year. NVIDIA's chipsets for Intel's current CPU bus interface are not affected by the dispute.
Sources:
TechConnect Magazine, NVIDIA
As of now, NVIDIA does not stand at the receiving end of any legal action, since the company has no chipset products either released, or in production, that supports Intel's Core i7 series processors. The legal-spat in the making, between the two companies, may however affect NVIDIA's possible plans to develop chipset products for Intel's new 45 nm and 32 nm processors. NVIDIA on its part, defends its position, dismissing Intel's claims. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's president and CEO maintained that the license agreement negotiated earlier would still apply, though he did not miss the opportunity to affirm his beliefs that the focus on CPU being the soul (if not the heart) of the PC, is slowly yet surely shifting towards the GPU. "This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business" he said. According to the NVIDIA CEO, it is obvious that Intel fears the competition NVIDIA poses with its platform core-logic innovations, that it had to file the complaint. This spat between the two major computer hardware companies could get uglier in the days to come. The press-release from NVIDIA in response to Intel's charges follows:
NVIDIA Responds To INTEL Court Filing
NVIDIA Corporation today responded to a Monday court filing (Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware) in which Intel alleged that the four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as Nehalem. The filing does not impact NVIDIA chipsets that are currently being shipped.
"We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. "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."
NVIDIA entered into the agreement in 2004 in order 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.
Since signing the agreement, NVIDIA has offered innovations such as SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA parallel processing. ION, the most recent innovation, integrates a powerful NVIDIA GPU, north bridge and south bridge into one compact die. When combined with a CPU, ION enables a two-chip PC architecture for Intel processors two years ahead of Intel's own solution. In addition, the ION platform offers 10x the performance of Intel's current three chip design.
The industry and consumers now count on innovations from NVIDIA. Microsoft recently endorsed ION because it offers consumers the first truly affordable premium Windows experience. Late last year Apple selected NVIDIA's chipset for its entire new line of notebooks including the MacBook Classic, MacBook Air, MacBook and MacBook Pro. Today, companies like Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, Falcon Northwest, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, NEC, and Toshiba all ship exciting innovations created by NVIDIA as a result of its agreement with Intel.
Huang said that, given the broad and growing adoption of NVIDIA's platform innovations, it is not surprising that Intel is now initiating a dispute over a contract signed four years ago. Innovations like ION, SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA threaten Intel's ability to control the PC platform.
NVIDIA has been attempting to resolve the disagreement with Intel in a fair and reasonable manner for over a year. NVIDIA's chipsets for Intel's current CPU bus interface are not affected by the dispute.
65 Comments on Intel Sues NVIDIA Over Chipset License, NVIDIA Responds
It seems that those who sue are serious cowards. Taking stuff here and here, I just wished they competed between each other like fair players just like when ATI and Nvidia went apeshit on each other in the DX9 generation. And they still do.
And the rest is just :roll:, like paid benchmarks. I won't say they don't do it, to an extent, but don't think for 1 second they have the monopoly on that. Or that they control any significant portion of the media. lol
And cough* TLB errata *cough.
Companies are simply that, companies and they want to make money. AMD and Ati have done those things less (they did them though), simply because they have been less times on the lead and for a shorter time. Give them the lead and some time and you get another FX or X850. It didn't take them too much to release misleading HD4870X2 slides neither.
g80 320mb has , they did strongly said they can do HDR and they paid crytek to make a tech demo wich looked absoluetly awesome and they support even today HDR in source engine so it's more a developer choice how they wanted to do it , partially that looked just as well and worked even on x850 or full wich worked only on shader 3.0.
I didn't defend AMD , i just said i like this war and i hope they loose a lot of money , i dislike Nvidia's ways , i always stumble o some news about Nvidia picking on someone or blaming someone , they are always perfect , they are noisy and that have a spoiled attitude.
It's not their fault sales are bad , the partners are to blame ( and look how they run from them to ATI and hope Intel joins the party with some good stuff ) , they are 1 milion times faster than a CPU but wait , they still need it to emulate some stuff that the simple GPU can't do , the cpu is stil vital but to hell with it , let's bash intel who is 5-10 times bigger than us just to get some publicity about how great we are and pull stunts like the one with the myth busters.
If you think how much they abused Intel and the cpu bussines i'm amazed they didn't retaliate much earlier considering Intel has a reputation for being very ruthless , and i'm amazed how much their parteners (Nvidia's ) put up with Nvidia who always blames them and put the pressure on them to cut costs and cut prices at their expenses , no wonder they leave.
This kind of behaviour can be considered very hostile by intel and they take steps to eliminate the threat , what to do ? continue business with Nvidia while they bash a little the importance of CPU and how you don't need to buy a fast CPU and how great is the GPU that one day the CPU will be something like a soundcard or network card , it's very understandable what they do , they want to kill Nvidia but for now they content with them not making money from the chipset business.
And all this could've been avoided is Nvidia just shut up and mind their own problems or schemes , just pretend they are friends with intel and stab them in the back when you had all you wanted ( licenses or whatever ) , a company runed by stupid people that all they want is glory ( we are the best , we do , we can ..... ) and make noise.
Let's hope i'm not murdered by some Nvidia fanboy now :) , i like Nvidia cards , I LOVE THEM :D .
Business is war. Businesses will do whatever they can to maintain their advantages or they might as well just give up. Intel doesn't like other companies eating into the pie they want to own.
Don't start thinking that Intel is the evil one here. Any company will aggressively defend its future if they see a threat and can act on it in any way. And hell, like we know what NVIDIA is up to really. Maybe they pissed off Intel. Consumers don't know jack about the inner workings of these places and siding with them is a bad call.
I think if NV was smart they'd get SLI to be chipset agnostic ASAP. ATI has managed it.
I am very curious as to what Larrabee will turn into. Intel may not go after gaming, but they have plans for dealing with the GPGPU threat that's for damn sure.
- I said AMD's FX and Ati's x850, because at the time they were the faster thing around and costed an arm an a leg. In fact, comparatively, they costed much more than any Intel or Nvidia card costed in recent years. i.e. The 8800 Ultra. It's no correct to blame only Nvidia or Intel for that practice then, when you have the best product you price it accordingly, it's not their fault they are most of times above. lol
- Erm the Nvidia blaming partners is a very simple thing taken out of proportion by the media. I can't remember where, but I've readed the true comment to the shareholders (from where all that came out) and not the second or third hand info you can get in most sensationalist news. They ONLY said that because of the crisis and competition, partners still had a lot of stock, and thus instead of asking for 3 month inventory they asked for half that. In the case of why Nvidia didn't sell as much that quarter, partners are to blame, because they didn't buy what they used to. Doesn't mean they are guilty. It was said in the sense that, it's not that they still don't want the chips or that Nvidia did something wrong, overall sales were lower for everyone and once sales return to normality, so will the partners demand. No partner took those comments for bad, because they know what is all about, it's the media and speciffically some media who make all that thing "explode" like it was somthing important.
- Nvidia has never said that the CPU is not important, that it will dissapear, they said that high-end CPUs are becoming more irrelevant with each generation as they are today, and Ion platform confirms that. Even a weak CPU like Atom (albeit with retained i/o capabilities) does well for 95% of the people when into Ion. Anyway, it was Intel the first one attacking the GPU, saying that the GPU was not important at all. That was when they were commented about their crappy IGPs and how Nvidia's were much better. Like saying, "might be better but unnecessary". We know that's not true. Historically CPUs have been becoming more and more powerful at number crunching along with their ability to act like the director of other parts in the PC. Today the GPU is much better suited for number crunching and there's no point increasing the power of the CPUs for that purpose, that same silicon should be used to improve the i/o capabilities of the CPU so that cheap ones dont become such the bottleneck they are today.
The trend confirms Nvidia is right, in year 2000 PC enthusiasts used to spend way more on the CPU than on the GPU, today we usually spend more on the GPU, because it's there where the benefit is. Spend $800 instead of $200 in a CPU and you get what, a 50% increment? Do that, no, do $100 versus $400 on GPUs and it's a world apart, no tto mention the benefits are much greater. That's Nvidia's point.
- Nvidia, nor AMD nor anyone have to ask Intel for something they have the right to do. On the contrary is Intel who always tries to bend the situation, to a place where they are close to a monopoly, but yet far enough that the law can't put the hands on them. This is no different.
- In any case, I fail to see how a fight that will severely damage Nvidia is good for anyone, except Ati of course. The best for the customer is to have two potent graphics companies. We need stronger Ati, not weaker Nvidia, by any means.
Abotu AMD's and Ati's prices you could be right , i don't know what the prices were for top stuff at that time and i got mainstream components all the time , i know FX series was very pricie but i remember the intel CPU's were too very expensive and what worked then for intel was not better hardware but the marketing machine , the bullshit was so big that people sweared on their children Intel Cpu's ( netburst ) are better.
About Nvidia and Intel war i don't really know who was the first one to start the fight but look at this
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJeYFxpUyQ&annotation_id=annotation_764898&feature=iv
Now you tell me how big the bullshit is here and how staged everything is , if i was Intel i would burry them in lawsuits until they die.
There is another thing to consider , let's say a man called jimy invents the CPU and follows this invention that one day becomes very rich , some other guy wants a piece of this great thing of making money called bob and he buys a license to build cpu's , all nice until here but one day jimy regrets giving him a license because bob all it does is copy most of his work and is a pain in the ass making money from his invetion.
This invention of his ( jimy ) is built on a motherboard and all that stuff that go around wich is invented by them too for supporting the CPU , again some people wanted to get rich from this too and bought a license to build this stuff , they sold to them the license but one day they regret giving them means to get rich because they attacked them saying bad things about them so they don't want to give them the right to build MB's for their creations.
It's not moving the world forward this kind of thinking but this is the world were we live.
The last paragraph, apart from being a mess is utterly wrong, because in that imaginary setting you presented, Intel is NOT jimy, to begin with...
The video shows a stupid thing that can be done by the cpu also and just as fast or faster , there are just a few dots there , can you actually contradict me on this that the CPU can't do a picture like the mona lisa that fast ?
You are missing the fact all those presentations are made on a CPU , anything that is involded there at the base it needs a CPU , the gpu is a simple powerfull raw calculator , but it is stupid and anything complex makes it obsolete.
You are talking like some fanboy who doesn't know anything more than what it reads on forums and internet , the gpu is not a miracle computing power , they don't even have a fab where to build this things, the cpu business has fabs and if they want they can build a CPU made from 4 billion transitors and organized in 1000-2000 threads with the usual tweaking only a CPU with fabs can do ( lot's of mhz's ) , then it will encode a movie so fast your head will spin but they can't do that because they must build a CPU wich works well on all kinds of software and most of them don't need this kinds of parallelization or don't take any advantage from having this.
I'm dissapointed i'm talking with people that are defending any hype is going around and a few years latter they discover how blown out of proportions some things were and how manipulative some companies are about any stupid feature they have and how much this can help people.
Why do you think it's so hard to make anything work on a GPU ( CPU software i mean ) , because it's so basic in what it can do and they hit the limitations so often they always end up making more stuff on the CPU or the limitations are so big there is no advantage using the GPU for a particular software.
What the GPU is as a piece of hardware is very simple for CPU engineers and the raw power can be matched and by far overtaken , but they can't do it just for the purpose of being the best at number crunching, they will build it as a video card and then they will have a reason to build a big stupid calculator.
The reason Nvidia fears so much Intel is because they know the GPU is not anything groundbreaking , it's not finetuned like a CPU is and the old rumors Nvidia would want to build a CPU is hillarious , they could never compete with Intel or AMD considering they don't have a fabs and can't finetune a CPU to that level even if they had , plus many companies made some sort of CPU's with extraordinary numbers ( tera flops ) but as always they can't be profitable for destkop or even just as powerfull ( IBM made lot's of so called powerfull cpu's and the latest one would be the ones in xbox360 and ps3 ).
They are cocky before they fall , they want to die with pride ( Nvidia ) .
It doesn't matter how difficult might be for developers to make programs outside of x86, tht is because and only because they are not used to, because there's no documentation or past works you can work around, not because the architecture itself is any harder to work with. And as of the kind of work that a GPU can do, of course they can't do many things, but the things they DO are the ones that most power require. Again no one said that a PC can run without a CPU, but it CAN run with a CPU that competely lacks FP capabilities, for example, with all it's die area deboted to integer, i/o operations and coherency.
What I think about parallel computing is not based in anyting Nvidia, AMD, Intel or whatnot say in their PR BS, it's directly taken out from works they publish at Standford regarding parallel computing. And in that front, they are the vanguard. And interestingly enough they took the GPGPU approach, first with Ati's X1900 architecture and later With Nvidia through CUDA and Ati/AMD through their Stream (Brook+) approach.
YOU have no idea of what parallel computing is nor anything about it's benefits, something that no CPU can dream of, and so is the case that Intel had no choice than to make thier own "GPU". Because a CPU with all that power is USELESS if it's going to be idling all the time, that's the reason that CPU's only have few ALUs. On the other hand the GPU has no choice than to be there unused most of the time, because when you do need the power, you need a lot of it.
So don't try to make a point out of an idea with no fundament and that even technogy trends are ignoring. And don't call ignorant when you make it clear you don't have a clue about what you are talking. You are so ignorant, in fact, that you are unable to understand that what mythbusters did, was only a representation, lol.
First show me a CPU doing a rendering at 1680x1050 4xAA and acceptable framerates and then we could continue speaking of something. My God. :shadedshu
And BTW, AMD is fabless since yesterday I think, since the shareholders have agreed to The Foundry Company.
EDIT: Now that I think of it, isn't it stupid that I have to explain these things to a guy with $45 worth of CPU and a $180 GPU?? A guy who spent more on the GPU, than on CPU+mobo+ram??
I bet you there was no GPU in that machine and that was a staged presentation , like those prototype cars with no engine , there was missing the GPU.
Enough with this , after you said a cpu can't render a picture i think i waste my time arguing with you , go read some Nvidia newsletters and some slides , they tell the "real truth".
Second, MythBusters thing. Man I don't think it's so difficult to understand. I said:Because it's a representation, just goes to show the difference of the speed at which both can perform a highly parallel task. For example rendering. A CPU can render an image in 3Dmax, maya, lightwave, etc (lol I'm loling at the fact that yo thought I don't know about that ("offline"/production rendering), when I ACTUALLY work on that :laugh:), but it takes seconds or minutes to render what a GPU does 60 times per second. Is this clear enough for you to understand??
How about this, my quad is faster than my 8800GT at encoding H.264 whenever I enable any advanced filters.
No matter how you look at it, the cpu is a very important piece of the computer puzzle. Nvidia is downplaying it's importance for marketing purposes.
And once again, I'm not saying the CPU is not an essential part, and I have never interpreted Nvidia's words like saying that either. But think about this, Atom can't do anything, but when you pair it up with a more than modest GPU, it does wonders. What Nvidia said is that the days of $1000 PCs with a $500 CPU and $50 GPU are gone. 50%/50% ($250 each) gives much better results and not only for the gamers.