What Is the Intel/nVidia Skirmish Really About? - Page 2

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Ujesh Desai, vice president of product marketing for nVidia, argued that this is about offering a better product to customers through the chipset. "Our business is graphics, as opposed to Intel's graphics that tend to be very poor. They want to bundle their graphics so you don't have to take our graphics, so they don't give you a choice. We think a consumer should be able to choose," he told InternetNews.com

Not so, insists Mulloy. "This is about IP rights," he said. "It's an asset that our investors expect to get a return on and whether it comes from those IP assets being used in our products or licensed for use in someone else's products, we expect people to adhere to the license."

Neither Intel nor nVidia would disclose whether Nehalem was brought up during negotiations. Work began on the new architecture in 2003, but whether that new architecture was disclosed to nVidia at the time of negotiations is unclear.

If history is a guide

nVidia believes the contract as negotiated still applies to Nehalem even though Nehalem is very different from the old architecture. That's something else the two firms disagree on. "They are trying to call it a new architecture, but it's just repackaging," argues Desai.

However, nVidia might want to look at past precedent. When Intel released the Pentium 4 in 2001, it told all Pentium III licenses they needed a new bus license to build P4-compatible motherboards.

VIA Technologies, then a major player in the chipset space, said it didn't need one. Intel put legal pressure on motherboard OEMs and VIA-based motherboards disappeared from store shelves almost overnight.