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NVIDIA Sues Qualcomm and Samsung Seeking To Ban Import of Samsung Phones

Posted by samzenpus on from the sue-baby-sue dept.

Calibax writes NVIDIA has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the ITC and in the U.S. District court in Delaware. The suit alleges that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing. NVIDIA is seeking damages and a ban on U.S. import of a number of devices with Snapdragon and Exynos processors until there is an agreement on licensing.

13 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Easy by ArcadeMan · · Score: 4, Funny

    NVIDIA Sues Qualcomm, and Samsung Seeking To Ban Import of Samsung Phones

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    1. Re:Easy by CajunArson · · Score: 2

      Samsung: So big that it patent trolls itself.

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      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  2. Re:Really? by Tmackiller · · Score: 2

    I..I, um... what? Back to /b/ with you.

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  3. Switching to AMD by StormReaver · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thankfully, the Open Source AMD video driver has progressed enough to use it for normal computing. I've been using it on cards I already had laying around, and it performs very well for daily use. It performs much better than Nouveau (which isn't surprising, since AMD released full specifications, and nVidia requires complete clean-room reverse engineering), and integrates into a Linux desktop cleaner than the nVidia proprietary driver (nVidia destroys the boot display, for example).

    Now I have enough motivation to no longer use nVidia. Thank you, nVidia, for helping AMD gain some ground.

    1. Re:Switching to AMD by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Informative

      Rather surprisingly, I have also been quite happy with the developments of the open source Radeon driver under Linux. Works great and the performance is excellent.

    2. Re:Switching to AMD by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Qualcomm's GPU core, Adreno, is actually something Qualcomm purchased from ATi/AMD when they spun off their mobile division. Long ago ATi was doing mobile GPUs before NVidia and Intel were doing them (and before they became commonplace when graphics were still mostly software driven).

      Anyhow, I suppose NVidia was in trouble - they had a popular SoC and their subsequent ones have failed to capitalize on it (remember when practically all Android tablets had NVidia Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs?).

  4. Interesting article on Semiaccurate about this by edxwelch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Previously, Nvidia said that it would license it's Kepler GPU cores to third parties. Semiaccurate maintains that this licensing program was in fact bogus and was conceived purely to justify future patent trolling activities. Semiaccurate also claims that
    Nvidia tried to "shakedown" Apple with the same patents and Apple subsequently gave the contract for the Mac Pro GPU to AMD as punishment.

  5. This is not patent trolling. by flowerp · · Score: 2

    nVidia holds a lot of patents in the fields of graphics technology - it is a major player in this field and to date has a large market share in the desktop amd mobile GPU market. This is absolutely no patent trolling.

    It's just the usual insane patent wars among major players in technology. I highly doubt this will go to court. There will just be a quiet agreement among the parties involved before this escalates too much.

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  6. Re:Here come the Samsung fanboys... by bytestorm · · Score: 3, Informative

    I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe Samsung is violating any of Nvidia's patents directly by using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 and 805 in a product. They received the part and associated driver software from QCOM as a final product and all components and features therein are protected from patent violations. Just like you can't be sued for violating Nvidia's patents by using an AMD GPU which has Nvidia-patented features in your PC, Samsung is protected by purchasing the part from QCOM. Nvidia could block further sales of the Snapdragon CPU to Samsung, but not sales of derived products; even though to to the end consumer it amounts to the same thing. So unless Samsung is violating their agreement with QCOM by enabling features they didn't license from QCOM, NV can't touch them here.

    Similar deal with Exynos (Samsung's SOC) since it licenses the IP involved directly from ARM and Imagination Technologies (Mali and PowerVR GPUs respectively). Unless Samsung's legal team is collectively idiots and/or assholes, they should be protected by their upstream licensing agreements.

    Then again, NV is never going to sue ARM because they would be in a seriously shitty position to renew *their* ARM licenses (if ARM didn't just terminate them on the spot) and then ARM would laugh all the way to the bank about who isn't shipping products.

    Based on that, it's my opinion that Samsung shouldn't be involved in this lawsuit and Nvidia just pulled them in because that's where the money is.

  7. Re:So.. by aNonnyMouseCowered · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know if the patents legitimate or not. They could be legitimate (ie approved by some patent office and not yet invalidated by a court) and still be bad patents. But a high-profile IT company that starts filing patent law suits can only mean one thing, the company has peaked and is on its way down. So maybe you should start looking for your graphic card and cellphones elsewhere? (AMD suing Intel is a different thing, since it concerns Intel's supposed monopolistic business practices.)

  8. Re:Here come the Samsung fanboys... by jrumney · · Score: 2

    I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe Samsung is violating any of Nvidia's patents directly by using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 and 805 in a product. They received the part and associated driver software from QCOM as a final product

    And thats where your idea of this business starts to unravel. Without the drivers, it could be that the Snapdragon does not violate any of those patents, any more than a bare Intel CPU violates the Amazon 1-click patent. And the same could be true for the software - without the hardware to run on, maybe it is not violating any patents (some would argue that this is, or should be, always true of all software). Generally, licensing or downloading of drivers is completely separate from purchasing of parts (this is not like retail PC peripherals, where the drivers come on a CD in the box). Only when Samsung puts them together in a product with certain features, does it start infringing.

    Also, it is very common for patents to be the responsibility of the manufacturer of an end product, with "license included" variants of a component often being significantly more expensive than licensing the patents yourself if you are a big enough company to have the army of lawyers necessary to deal with the negotiations.

  9. Re:Trying to get bought out? by Nemyst · · Score: 2

    You mean aside from the fact Intel has patent agreements with Nvidia? It's pretty clear to me that Nvidia's trying very hard to increase their share in the mobile market and one way to do it is to get some cash from competitors through licensing agreements. Or maybe they want some of Qualcomm's patents for their own products?

    As per usual, /. ignores AnandTech's excellent overview of the situation.

  10. hum, i call bullshit on this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Henry Gouraud invented computer graphics shading 70's
    1. Pixar Renderman 1988 Shading rendering, Programmable Shaders using cpu
    2. Unified Shader by ATI :https://www.google.com/patents/US8760454
    3. multithreaded parallel processing By INTEL http://www.google.ca/patents/USRE41849
    4. Programmable Shaders Nvidia http://www.google.com/patents/US6664963 This one is questionable since it was done in software before gpu's

    All these things were conceptualized in the 60's, 70's, 80's.