After being sued by chipmaker Intel, graphics-card maker Nvidia has countersued. In a filing Thursday in the Delaware Court of Chancery, Nvidia sued Intel for breach of contract and sought to terminate Intel’s license to Nvidia’s patent portfolio.
Nvidia’s action comes after the companies sought a settlement outside of court for “well over a year,” according to Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy.
Last month Intel sued Nvidia, charging that a four-year-old chipset license agreement did not include Intel’s future-generation central processing units with integrated memory controls, including its Nehalem processor. Intel also said Nvidia was falsely claiming its products were licensed.
‘We Must Defend Ourselves’
According to Nvidia, the companies agreed in 2004 that Nvidia would bring its products to Intel CPU-based systems and Intel accepted a license to Nvidia’s portfolio of 3-D, GPU and other patents.
“Nvidia did not initiate this legal dispute,” said Jen-Hsuen Huange, president and CEO of Nvidia. “But we must defend ourselves and the rights we negotiated for when we provided Intel access to our valuable patents. Intel’s actions are intended to block us from making use of the very license right that they agreed to provide.”
“We filed a suit seeking a declaratory judgment in February and this is their response, and it’s not surprising,” Mulloy said. “It completely supports the point we made from the onset.”
“We just simply could not move forward and could not move back, and rather than waiting until products are out and patent-infringement claims, we said let’s let the courts decide what their rights are since they disagree with us and we disagree with them,” he said.
Not having a license agreement with Intel for its Nehalem processor may be a significant loss for Nvidia since Intel is the world’s number-one maker of PC microprocessors and has more than an 80 percent market share, according…