Nvidia Overclocks Intel's Patience

The tentative sparring between Intel and Nvidia over the terms of their chipset licensing agreement has evolved into a full-on street brawl. Earlier this week, Intel filed suit against Nvidia, seeking a declaratory judgment that would prevent the company from peddling nForce motherboards that support Intel’s new Nehalem-class chips, which feature integrated memory controller functionality. “The suit seeks to have the court declare that Nvidia is not licensed to produce chipsets that are compatible with any Intel processor that has integrated memory controller functionality, such as Intel’s Nehalem microprocessors and that Nvidia has breached the agreement with Intel by falsely claiming that it is licensed,” Intel said in a statement. “Intel has been in discussions with Nvidia for more than a year attempting to resolve the matter but unfortunately we were unsuccessful.”

That, of course, is because Nvidia (NVDA) feels there’s no need for a resolution. In its opinion, the terms of its licensing agreement with Intel (INTC) do indeed cover the chip giant’s Nehalem processors and other upcoming chips. And it views Intel’s claim that the agreement is otherwise as an effort to hamstring Nvidia’s platform innovations, which Intel sees as a threat to its PC dominance. “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.”

http://www.pugetsystems.com Jon Bach

I think this is more about posturing for a rising GPU business than it is about protecting a decaying CPU business. NVIDIA has little reason to make high end Corei7 chipsets – they already lost out on that business when they licensed SLI to Intel for use in the Intel X58 chipset. Why use an NVIDIA chipset when you can get SLI on a rock solid Intel chipset?

What this is about is lower end boards with integrated GPUs. You can see NVIDIA’s direction in their new ION product. They’re going after entry level products, getting their GPU bundled. What they want here is to be able to offer a Corei7 platform with integrated GPU, probably in micro-ATX — something we haven’t yet seen from Intel. Of course, Intel would rather get this GPU business for themselves, with Larrabee coming in 2010. If they can keep NVIDIA out of the integrated GPU market for Corei7, they’ll have it all to themselves.
http://www.amazingmassage.com Tom Chatterton

I’ve been reading up about the advances in the GPU during recent issues of PC magazines. Currently, Intel has made a comment to graphics manufactures to give the much faster CPU’s a 2nd look, especially in shading technology. I think their argument is the Quad Cores, and especially the Core i7 are better suited to today’s graphics bare knuckled. But if I were Intel, I wouldn’t isolate Nvidia. You’ll be left holding the bag. (Too late.) I’m sure AMD is chomping at the bit and will have a chip comparable to the Core i7 in the near future, not in full performance, but in near performance…such that lower and middle performing graphics cards manufacturers will choose an AMD chip for better profits. Look, AMD knows how to make Quad Cores too, and respectfully fast I might add…they just haven’t added an onboard memory controller – yet. Since 95% of the games are STILL trying to be compatible to the gForce cards currently on the market…anything EXTRA to come out in this slower economy that is cheaper plus faster…is going to clean up all the marbles. It’s simple economics. The bulk of the computer market is in the UNDER $900 range. An expensive vid card isn’t going to cut it in a mainline motherboard, I feel.

If Intel hasn’t started in the middle floors on graphics tech yet, to learn the market, my feelings are they’ll price themselves out of the market even if they come out with a pretty awesome vid card.
Tom Budde

Chatterton what are you talking about??? Intels anything cant do anything good with graphics, and their quad cores arent going to be doing graphics.

AMD has had an integrated memory controller for years, which is why their operteron server cpus have dominated the Xeon in so many applications and why AMD powers the worlds fasters supercomputers.

AMD already has i7 competitors out with the Shanghai cpus for servers and DDR3 versions of the Phenom II X4s for desktops.

Intel isnt coming out with a great video card anytime soon, they will probably end up using AMD graphics cards, for the irony. It seems Intel is trying to limit their competition to their one real competitor at all things x86 computer related.

games arent necessarily coded to be compatable to Nvidia geforce, but Nvidia and AMD have to tweak drivers to best work with the games programming. They use standards, such as directX, direct3d, opengl to make games.

Nvidia Overclocks Intel's Patience

comments so far. Add yours.

AllThingsD by Writer