You're so money
It hasn't been a bad week for NVIDIA. Having banged on about Tegra and tablets for years it all finally became a reality at CES last week, together with a bunch of other juicy news and a massive spike in its share price. How do you follow that up? By rinsing your biggest and most hated rival to the tune of $1.5 billion, that's how.
Yup, Intel and NVIDIA have announced that they will renew their previous cross-licensing agreement for another six years, with Intel paying NVIDIA $1.5 billion in five instalments starting next year. As if it's some kind of afterthought, the press release says: "NVIDIA and Intel have also agreed to drop all outstanding legal disputes between them."
Now we can't claim to know the exact value of all the patents Intel and NVIDIA use of each others, but we'd be very surprised if they're so heavily weighted in NVIDIA's favour. In fact no mention of money was made when the last cross-license deal was announced in 2004. What this seems to be is Intel effectively conceding defeat in its legal conflict with NVIDIA and settling out of court in order to save face.
"This agreement signals a new era for NVIDIA," said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA boss. "Our cross license with Intel reflects the substantial value of our visual and parallel computing technologies. It also underscores the importance of our inventions to the future of personal computing, as well as the expanding markets for mobile and cloud computing."
"This agreement ends the legal dispute between the companies, preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product design," said Doug Melamed, Intel general counsel. "It also enables the companies to focus their efforts on innovation and the development of new, innovative products."
It's all very well for Intel to talk about ‘patent peace' but it was the one that kicked all this off back in early 2009. Since then Intel has had to shell out $1.25 billion in damages to AMD and told to play fair from now on, with the same investigation looking into NVIDIA's allegations in the patent dispute. It seems that Intel realised litigation was the wrong move, in hindsight, and the decision to call in the lawyers has ended up costing it another massive lump sum.
