Discussions

In recent news there's been talks about this Intel/NVIDIA lawsuit business that's going on.  If you're not familiar with it, here's how it breaks down.  Back in 2004 Intel bestowed unto NVIDIA the license to manufacture chipsets for Intel processors.  In exchange, NVIDIA made chipsets for Intel CPUs and gave Intel users the option of running multiple graphics cards in a SLI configuration.

The license, according to Intel, did not cover all buses and thus does not necessarily extend to its latest microprocessors - mainly Core i7 and future mainstream versions (Core i5, etc...).  NVIDIA believes that the license does allow it to make chipsets for these processors. And thus we have a legal dispute.

If NVIDIA wins, then it'll make chipsets for Core i7, Core i5 and any other Intel processors that come down the pipe.  Business is as usual.  If Intel wins however, the question is whether or not it will grant NVIDIA the license to manufacture chipsets.

I was talking with one of my editors the other day about this situation and if I were in Intel's position, I'm not sure I'd want to grant NVIDIA the right to manufacture chipsets for Intel CPUs.  From an end-user perspective competition is always good, but I'm not sure I see Intel's motivation to want to extend a license to NVIDIA in the first place.

With Larrabee on the way, should it be successful, there's no need for Intel to want to have NVIDIA making integrated graphics solutions for its platforms.

Personally I don't believe any of the integrated graphics solutions offer high enough performance; while it's nice to have better performance than Intel integrated graphics from AMD and NVIDIA, it's still not good enough to really play most modern day games on.  It's something that I've argued about for years now; AMD and NVIDIA do offer much better integrated graphics than Intel, but that's not hard to do, neither company offers good-enough graphics in my opinion.

I'll be curious to see what happens if Intel wins the suit, will we see a new chipset licensing agreement between itself and NVIDIA or will Intel take on the task of exclusively making integrated graphics chipsets for its CPUs.