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Intel To Pay NVIDIA Licensing Fees of $1.5 Billion
wiredmikey writes "NVIDIA and Intel have agreed to drop all outstanding legal disputes between them and Intel will pay NVIDIA an aggregate of $1.5 billion in licensing fees payable in five annual installments, beginning Jan. 18, 2011. Under the new agreement, Intel will have continued access to NVIDIA's full range of patents."
Wonder if Intel will be able to use any of NVidia's patents to bolster their GPUs, which is really their only sore spot at the moment (Atom vs. ARM might be a sore spot, but there's hope there).
I can't help but wonder if this was primarily a fig leaf for Intel's licensing/acquisition of NVIDIA's GPU technology with which to compete with AMD and its acquisition and incorporation of ATI's graphics products within its own silicon. This may have advantages over the alternative of Intel making an offer to purchase all of NVIDIA.
Both ATI and nVidia suck. But it is far better to have the two of them competing with each other to at least pretend to be meeting their customers needs than to have one of them fail leaving us with only a single source for graphics chipsets. Would you really like to see AMD/ATI become the single video card vendor, complete with an AT&T "fuck you, we don't have to care, where else are you going to go?" attitude?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What's wrong with nVidia? They don't provide open source drivers, but they do provide the *best* drivers for Linux. While I'd rather have good and open source drivers, good is a higher priority to me. I guess ATI has been getting better, but I've never had bad experiences with nVidia drivers.
And it's worth noting that they don't provide open source Windows drivers either and likely never will. Complaining because they don't do more for Linux users than they do for Windows users seems strange to me.
get this: even if windows is better for some stuff, die hard zealots will stick to linux, it's about being open/free source.
ATI contributes code in the open, even if it sucks, it's preferable (for the die hards) than the better working but proprietary nVidia code.
What ? Me, worry ?
Get this: Linux users are a minority, and die-hard zealots are a minority in that minority.
Most of the people who buy video cards do so either for high-end industrial work or gaming, and the vast majority of those people use Windows and do not care whether their drivers are open source or not.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)