Intel Files Lawsuit Against Nvidia

[bahlgren342]

I have an nForce 4 board at the moment. Can't wait to burn it after I upgrade.

[hollo]

no reason why NV couldn't get motherboards made that have 128/256mb GDDR2/3 soldered to the board along with a GPU (eg 9400) that connects to the existing PCI-e connections when activated in the BIOS, and passes the PCI-e lanes to a PCI-e x16 connector when disabled, basically like the ATI rage chips with their 4 or 8mb vram that you get on server boards

personally i'd buy a board like that over a motherboard with a GPU that accessed system memory in a second. i hope they lose this case just so they'll go ahead and do it!

[saaya]

Why the heck would anyone want an nVidia i7 chipset anyways? With X58 supporting both Crossfire and SLI.

hmmm lets see, lower qpi multipliers for higher bclocks, possibly higher than 4ghz/8GTs qpi clocks, much much better pciE overclocking...

im not saying nvidias chipsets are great, but if intel managed to lock them out then intel owns the whole platform, and they can do whatever they want.

apart from beeing able to force some crazy drm onto us, pushing prices to ridiculous levels, limiting or locking overclocking on at least some segments, the most important thing is: innovation and diversification!

if your the only chipset provider for 90% of the markets cpus, then there is almost no pressure ot diversify or innovate. it doesnt mean intel wont diversify their products and wont innovate to meet all segments demands, but it makes it very likely that sooner or later innovation and diversification will get worse, worse and worse.

[zanzabar]

i would like to see via, or ati. ati wont happen but the r600 was great and they actually unlinked the memory from the FSB without using variable multis something that NV could never do. and via would be great but i doubt that they could pay for a license

[drizzt5]

I never had a 790i but I had a 680 and let me tell you, that was PLENTY of nvidia crap for me.

seriously though, in what ways was the 790i the best board for 775? I can think of none.

Well right off the bat it has 3 pcie x 16 slots. Your motherboard for example only has two.

Your joking....? I can't tell.

[ToTTenTranz]

and apple is replacing the mac book with amd gpu and intel chipsets in q3, when the NV contract expires. they are only using it now becouse they have to

Source?

Also, vanilla macbooks with discrete GPUs? I find that hard to believe..

[bing]

"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."

Just wondering what is the word "GPU" stands for in Huang's mind ? General Processing Unit ?

How bout the "CPU" ? Prolly for him is Crappy Processing Unit ??

Just can't believe this dude, what a joke !

[eXa]

no reason why NV couldn't get motherboards made that have 128/256mb GDDR2/3 soldered to the board along with a GPU (eg 9400) that connects to the existing PCI-e connections when activated in the BIOS, and passes the PCI-e lanes to a PCI-e x16 connector when disabled, basically like the ATI rage chips with their 4 or 8mb vram that you get on server boards

That sentence is freaking impossible... i get a headache halfway through it.

[zanzabar]

Source?

Also, vanilla macbooks with discrete GPUs? I find that hard to believe..

sorry cant give one, but NV is being dropped. if u look back im like 99% on calling things like this, but sometimes a month or so off

but its going to go like this, apple is switching the newer intel platform with ddr3 sodimm then in the same time frame or just affter they will ofter the 46xx mobile

[Sr7]

sorry cant give one, but NV is being dropped. if u look back im like 99% on calling things like this, but sometimes a month or so off

but its going to go like this, apple is switching the newer intel platform with ddr3 sodimm then in the same time frame or just affter they will ofter the 46xx mobile

sigh... if only you knew..

[Sr7]

No..the GPU is multifold more simple than a CPU. Its like comparing a toy car with a real car. GPUs are simple in construction and contains alot of "copy/paste" logic. It takes about 4-5 years to develop a CPU with 1000s of people. A GPU is usually made in 1-1½ years with 100s of people. The record for a GPU is about 3 years I think. With completely new architecture. G80 costed about 475mio$ to develop according to nVidia. K10, K8, Core 2, i7 etc is multi billion$ research pieces.

This statement more than any other makes it completely clear that you make things up when you don't know the answer.

The GPU is just as complex if not moreso to design. It does *not* take 1-1/12 years for a new architecture. It takes 3-4 years. It also cost $1 billion for developing G80, not 500 million.

Additionally, 70% or so of the CPU die area is cache, not fundamental logic. This is contrasted with the GPUs relatively high % of logic vs. cache.

If you want to talk copy-paste logic you can probably look at multi-core on-die in a CPU.

Since it's so cheap, so fast, and so easy to design a GPU according to you, why hasn't Intel just made a directly competitive traditional GPU ASAP to put ATI and NV out of business? Why are they taking the larrabee/x86 route and risking a lot on something that doesn't have an ecosystem to support it? Do you think it will be easy to thread applications 16-64 ways?

They're making an awfully big bet on an unproven technology. Even if it works well, winning over developers to move to a GPU which has no installed base is a whole other struggle on top of that.

[ToTTenTranz]

This statement more than any other makes it completely clear that you make things up when you don't know the answer.

The GPU is just as complex if not moreso to design. It does *not* take 1-1/12 years for a new architecture. It takes 3-4 years. It also cost $1 billion for developing G80, not 500 million.

Additionally, 70% or so of the CPU die area is cache, not fundamental logic. This is contrasted with the GPUs relatively high % of logic vs. cache.


If you want to talk copy-paste logic you can probably look at multi-core on-die in a CPU.

So according to you, every engineer who works in Intel and AMD must be pretty stupid, if they only come up with a new design every 5 or 6 years, they're more in number and spend more money on R&D.

Tell me, what's the difference between each of GT200's 240 SPs? And each of RV770's 40 TMUs? There's no copy/paste in there?

Since it's so cheap, so fast, and so easy to design a GPU according to you, why hasn't Intel just made a directly competitive traditional GPU ASAP to put ATI and NV out of business?

Because they lack:

1 - Engineering experience for 3D-oriented hardware;
2 - Engineering experience for driver development;
3 - Patents for for efficient 3D architectures. nVidia and ATI have been registering those for more than 10 years now.

They're making an awfully big bet on an unproven technology. Even if it works well, winning over developers to move to a GPU which has no installed base is a whole other struggle on top of that.

Thank god for those guys who don't "fear the unproven". If everyone had that, we would still be using the fingers in our hands to make calculations.

Some people just don't get the point of science at all...

[dinos22]

i'm pretty sure they had little support from Intel to develop their chipsets and still managed to do a cracker job....not perfect but considering their improvement over older gen and issues with support nvidia did pretty good with their chipset. It's a real shame that 790i had some issues from previous gen otherwise as it shown amazing improvement to previous gen particularly overclocking and clock for clock performance wise against Intel chipsets. i never thought i'd see the day nvidia beat intel boards in SuperPi efficiency for example. That takes some serious skill on their part.

i really hope intel lose this lawsuit for everyone's sake because once we start losing that competition we will LOSE......WE WILL LOSE......that is correct. Remember this, companies dont innovate as much when they have a big advantage, they get lazy and y and just work their old tech to death until someones flies past them in a huge way....all manufacturers have been in this position including the three companies being discussed here.

Why do you guys think ATI sells their cards and CPUs at these prices now.......do you remember the days of 9800 cards and K8.......FX CPUs etc......how the time changed hey

well kiss all that goodbuy if you want Nvidia to die. That's an incredibly foolish thing to say, incredibly foolish. I dont think some people are stopping to think before they post here.

[ownage]

How little support did they have?
I can remember how Intel screwed DFI in the past by giving them 2 chipsets to develop there boards while ASUS received 100.
If nVidia also get screwed like that, then I can't blame nVidia for the quality.
As as customer that doesn't change much, I won't buy anything bad. That's how things work.

[Shintai]

The GPU is just as complex if not moreso to design. It does *not* take 1-1/12 years for a new architecture. It takes 3-4 years. It also cost $1 billion for developing G80, not 500 million.

Nope, 475million.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2870&p=5

And a CPU is multitude times more complex in instruction handing, logic complexity, validation etc. And your cache arguement doesnt hold water. Your multicore is like shooting yourself in the foot. Each TMU, shader etc is a pure copy of the other, and there tend to be alot of that in GPUs.

Just because you make a GPU with x amount of transistors doesnt make it complex in any way besides manufactoring.

[Mr Roboto]

Maybe I'm missing something here but what's the big deal? This obviously isn't over the Atom\Ion platform right? Does this mean Nvidia are getting ready to release an i7 based chipset?

[Linux_Box]

Competition is normally a good thing for consumers. The move by Intel doesn't appear to be a good thing in the long run for consumers. Hopefully Intel will prove me wrong on this!!

[ToTTenTranz]

Maybe I'm missing something here but what's the big deal? This obviously isn't over the Atom\Ion platform right? Does this mean Nvidia are getting ready to release an i7 based chipset?

What you're missing is that the lawsuit isn't because of i7 only. It's about every Intel CPU with a memory controller, and i7 just happens to be the first.
The next CPU with IMC in schedule is Atom Pineview, hence the Ion discussion.

[Donnie27]

What you're missing is that the lawsuit isn't because of i7 only. It's about every Intel CPU with a memory controller, and i7 just happens to be the first.
The next CPU with IMC in schedule is Atom Pineview, hence the Ion discussion.

Thank you!

Competition is normally a good thing for consumers. The move by Intel doesn't appear to be a good thing in the long run for consumers. Hopefully Intel will prove me wrong on this!!

No, that's not true at all. No one's stopping nVidia from paying for license. If Intel was shutting nVidia out by keeping them from PAYING like any one else, then all the talk of squashing competition might be valid.

If I'd invested Billions in MY IP, I'd want to collect license fees to recoup some of my expenditures as well. No matter what Socialist and Communist say, that's what truly drives innovation. To continue to grow, Intel has to compete with itself.

[Mr Roboto]

What you're missing is that the lawsuit isn't because of i7 only. It's about every Intel CPU with a memory controller, and i7 just happens to be the first.
The next CPU with IMC in schedule is Atom Pineview, hence the Ion discussion.

OK I see thanks. I didn't think Nvidia was releasing anymore Intel based chipsets.

Just saw this at VR-Zone

NVIDIA has responded to a Monday court filing in which Intel alleged that the 4-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel’s future generation CPUs with “integrated” memory controllers, such as Nehalem. Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reiterated that they are confident that their license, as negotiated, applies and that this is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.

Update #1 (19th Feb) : http://forums.vr-zone.com/news-aroun...ng-update.html

Update #2 (19th Feb) : The News has managed to scan a copy of the court filing.

Update #3 (19th Feb) : It looks like a reenact of the saga between Intel and VIA where Intel tried to block VIA on having the Pentium 4 FSB license back in 2001. As a result, many board makers were reluctant to make motherboards based on VIA chipsets, fearing of getting involved in the lawsuit. Therefore, we asked the same question if the motherboard makers will make boards based on Nvidia's Nehalem chipset. Most makers replied that they are waiting for further instructions from both sides and one of the makers is reluctant citing poor support from Nvidia as one of the reason.

Poor support from Nvidia you say, eh?

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

Poor support from Nvidia you say, eh?

that would be foxconn IIRC, they scrapped the dreadnought citing that the 790 chipset was so awful they couldn't work with it any more.

[tam2]

Dumb question here, does a company that owns a X license for A part allowed to ban other company that make supporting tech for that A part?
The way i see it, if it does allowed, then its possible in the future we will have an all intel parts from gfx to usb stick. Banning other chipset other than theirs is just a beginning.

-tam2-

[Mr Roboto]

that would be foxconn IIRC, they scrapped the dreadnought citing that the 790 chipset was so awful they couldn't work with it any more.

Yeah once my 680i was up and running it was great but when there were problems it was a nightmare. These chipsets are SO quirky and just have really weird issues unlike anything I've ever experienced. I imagine the 790i is similar since it's just a derivative of these early chipsets.

I remember hearing about Foxconn ditching the 790i. Gigabyte pulled their in house designed 680i because of these quirks. Most of the other big motherboard companies made sure NOT to follow Nvidia's reference design. Asus seems to be the only ones who created a successful in house version.

Too bad because with some work they could have been really good, although take SLI out of the equation and Intel based chipsets are clearly better.

[Donnie27]

Yeah once my 680i was up and running it was great but when there were problems it was a nightmare. These chipsets are SO quirky and just have really weird issues unlike anything I've ever experienced. I imagine the 790i is similar since it's just a derivative of these early chipsets.

I remember hearing about Foxconn ditching the 790i. Gigabyte pulled their in house designed 680i because of these quirks. Most of the other big motherboard companies made sure NOT to follow Nvidia's reference design. Asus seems to be the only ones who created a successful in house version.

Too bad because with some work they could have been really good, although take SLI out of the equation and Intel based chipsets are clearly better.

VIA lost that court battle though. They didn't have to pay Intel because they'd changed it (tech) enough that it almost didn't infringe anymore.

[Face]

If anyone feels like doing a lil' reading:

Intel court filing Vs. Nvidia:

http://www.itexaminer.com/images/Int...0Complaint.pdf