NVIDIA Files Complaints Against Samsung and Qualcomm for Infringing Its GPU Patents

I don't think US law has anything to do with it. It's just that the stock holders own the company, not the CEO. Unless the CEO owns the majority of the stock...

 

Correct me if im wrong, but they use ARM Mali Txxx on the Exynos no ? And Adreno obviously on the Snapdragon based chip.

If you can attack someone by include thoses gpu's architecture in your SOC, so can be Apple and many other.

 

Okay, so looking at the patents in question...

6198488: On modern mobile GPUs, where is the transform module? Where is the lighting module? The specific details of this patent only share some very superficial similarities with other designs.. at best.
6992667: On modern mobile GPUs, where is the skinning module? The patent doesn't do a great job explaining masking and swizzling at all, but if they mean the ability to predicate and reorder vertex inputs there are some obvious prior art examples like the PS2 VUs. Any "innovation" that boils down to putting different well understood and utilized algorithms on the same die is a farce and should be overturned, as this is both obvious and expected in the industry.
7038685: Might have something here, although you can find barrel processors with the same basic innovation that predate the patent file by many years.
7015913: Seems redundant vs 7038685.
6697063: Prior use here - the modernish rasterization process with depth buffering and perspective correct interpolation is predated by SGI GPUs (like in the N64) and the screen space tiling is predated by PowerVR PCX1.
7209140: Programmable vertex processing done by anything with a specialized vector coprocessor for this purpose, again looking at SGI machines for example.
6690372: Who is doing this in a hardware unit?

 

Exophase ... with your logical approach it's a shame Intel didn't have you instead of being represented by multiple patent law firms that eventually decided it was better to "licensed Nvidia's GPU patents for $1.5 billion over six years".

 

That's is a myth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html

 

That cash settlement was due to anti-competitive actions regarding chipset licenses, it was not a licensing fee for GPU patents. The additional broad cross-licensing of patents that accompanied this is a typical way to resolve a settlement and put the two companies on better terms. nVidia got access to completely unrelated Intel patents in addition to the cash payout. Receiving access to these patents doesn't mean that they were deemed to be infringing on them.

That said, defending weak patents does often result in settlements or even court victories. The patent office is full of patents that are very broad, vague, copies of prior products, obvious, or described by open standards. The office simply doesn't have the technical acumen required to properly audit the claims. It doesn't help that the patents are often written to be deliberately confusing and vague, filled with redundant and irrelevant information, legalese, and poor definition of the scope of the invention vs mere examples of its use.

What really gets me is when companies knowingly watch their competitors sell their products for years, only attacking with a lawsuit once they've established a huge ecosystem where they're utterly depending on the technology. This does not strike me as being in the spirit of the patent system.

 

Maybe as part of a settlement, NV and Samsung would announce a deal to ship Denver on some Samsung devices.

 

The $1.5b settlement was to prevent nVidia from being awarded in court over Intel over a breach of a licensing agreement specifically regarding chipsets.

http://www.dailytech.com/FTC+Reviewing+Intel+NVIDIA+Legal+Spat/article17036.htm

In other words, it was due to damages claimed by nVidia, NOT a cost to renew the cross licensing agreement. It was because Intel claimed that the license did not grant nVidia the right to make Nehalem compatible chipsets because of the IMC, and were able to block nVidia from releasing such chipsets by court order. Intel must have realized that nVidia would be able to overturn this prohibition and thus owe damages.

Now look back at the original 2004 cross-license agreement:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_17070.html

Do you think Intel paid a big cash payment to nVidia to be eligible for that cross license agreement then? No, it was an agreement of mutual benefit, covering an unknown swath of patents (by no means should we assume it was, for instance, limited to these 7 patents nVidia is citing now).

nVidia and Intel renewing the original cross license agreement is not part of the $1.5b in damages they agreed to pay, it was a separate part of the settlement.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung is secretely fiddling around with a custom CPU core based on ARM ISA; I'm just worried that it might stink more than their former own GPU development attempts

Another idea would be either Samsung or QCOM to buy NVIDIA and we can all live happily ever after (or something equally cheesy....). Rumors that large amounts of Samsung's personell was willing to commit suicide with the notion of having Jensen as CEO couldn't get verified until now....

 

Lol.. maybe not suicide, but they could go work for Hyundai instead. But what will Nvidia do of Samsung City .. Called it Jensen city or Nvidia City ? And im ask me what will happend with Lehmann Brothers Asia .. do we need to rename it to Jensen and brothers ?

Anyway, i wait the next flies of sue against the Samsung VR gear ..

 

Being that nVidia is forcing the issue, having these patents invalidated in court could ultimately be healthy for the industry.

Given the evolution of the research, API formulation and specification, and simultaneous multi-vendor development and implementation of many fundamental graphics approaches, nVidia has their work cut out for them in proving these patents are actionable.

 

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that NVIDIA's claims are valid, I could understand why they'd sue Qualcomm. But Samsung seems to be not only a strange target, but also a dangerous one.

Samsung makes laptops and buys GPUs to equip them. If I were them right now, I'd be very reluctant to buy those GPUs from NVIDIA. Other big OEMs (Lenovo, Asus, etc.) sell mobile devices with Qualcomm SOCs and laptops with discrete GPUs. They're not being sued at this time, but it stands to reason that they would be next in line.

It just seems like a very dangerous move.

Edit: after a quick look at Samsung's website, it seems that only one of their products uses discrete graphics, and it's from AMD. Maybe that's why Samsung is being sued and not Apple.

 

Are you saying that Samsung should be worried about Nvidia suing Samsung for using Nvidia GPUs? I must be missing something.

 

No, I'm saying that if I were Samsung, I wouldn't buy products from a company suing me.

 

Ok.

Either way, if Samsung is anything like the big conglomerate I've worked for (they are), the Samsung Laptop division isn't going to care one bit about what's going on at the Samsung Mobile group. (In fact, if they are like the one I've worked for, the other divisions might be cheering right now. )

Samsung Laptops is probably a different legal entity, it wants to make products that people want to buy. Minor stuff like this in a remote other part of the company is no big deal. (Yes: minor stuff. This is going to be about a few $100M maximum per year. Peanuts for a division that makes tens of billions in profits per year.)

 

Isn't the subtext of the suit that passing the buck on licensing fees between Samsung and Qualcomm isn't a reason to ignore license fees at all (as far as Nvidia is concerned ofc) ?
Involving both companies also opens the door to both possibly having to defend their positions against each other as well as the Nvidia.

They aren't buying products from Nvidia in any case, so what's the difference?

From a purely strategic PoV, what does Nvidia lose by pursuing this?
Worst case scenario: No case to answer, they're out legal fees, and the patents aren't used for further litigation.
Best case? Part or complete judgement in their favour and set legal precedent and a likely never ending revenue stream?
If you were a gambler (and JHH's personality says that he probably is), do you think the possible return of SoC royalties offsets the expenditure of a few million in legal fees?

As for Qualcomm, they seem to love the courtroom - Bandspeed, a looming antitrust case in China, Adaptix, ParkerVision coming back for another chunk of cash, and a possible EU case to answer - co-incidentally (?)initiated by Icera in June 2010.

I'd really like to find out what kind of cross-license and IP license structure ARM has in place. Considering ARM Holdings aren't shy about telling world+dog how many license holders they have, the only real info seems to come from the licensees press releases.