Qualcomm and Samsung are the two (un)lucky companies to be identified by NVIDIA and slapped with lawsuits for patent infringement. This is the first time the company is initiating a patent lawsuit after being 21 years in the business so September 4 marked an important day for them.
NVIDIA filed the patent infringement complaints with the U.S. District Court and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in Delaware. The chip manufacturer alleged that both Samsung and Qualcomm infringe on its GPU patents on multithreaded parallel processing, unified shaders, and programmable among others.
NVIDIA identified several Samsung products and Qualcomm mobile processors that use NVIDIA technologies. Samsung devices in question include the Galaxy Tab 2, Galaxy Note Pro, and Galaxy Tab S tablets, and the latest Samsung phones such as Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S4, and the Galaxy Note 3.
Some of these mentioned devices use mobile processors from Qualcomm. Most notable are the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801, and 805 chips.
NVIDIA currently has more than 7,000 patents under its belt. The company believes Samsung and Qualcomm used some of its technologies to create their own products without any license from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA is asking the courts to “determine infringement of NVIDIA’s GPU patents by all graphics architectures used in Samsung’s mobile products and to establish their licensing value” according to Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA.
The company says they invented the GPU. As a pioneer in computer graphics, NVIDIA has created some the best processors in the world today. NVIDIA’s GPUs allow the computers and mobile devices to display and generate images and beautiful graphics.
In a blog post, NVIDIA Chief Administrative Officer and Secretary David Shannon wrote that they already spent $9 billion in Research and Development since 1993. He stated that the company’s IP strategy is to see a return on investment by licensing their products, technologies, and patents. Unfortunately, Samsung and Qualcomm failed to comply with NVIDIA even after several meetings.
Shannon explained that they already demonstrated to Samsung how their patents apply to their South Korean giant’s mobile devices. Samsung only said this was the problem of supplier, which in this case, was Qualcomm.
NVIDIA said there is no proper licensing for the patented GPU technology. It’s now asking the courts to decide on the case and be reward proper compensation. No word from either Samsung or Qualcomm regarding this matter yet.
SOURCE: NVIDIA
“they already spent $9 billion in Research and Development since 1993.”
big deal, facebook spent 19 billion for an app 😛
And FB is a bad example considering their app is a piece of junk!
This is most likely an act of depression by Nvidia after the failure of their mobile processor project.
Desperation, not depression. Stupid autocorrect.