What NVIDIA wants
After a lot more legalese and redacted sections NVIDIA gets to its ‘Prayer for Relief'. Essentially it wants the courts to conclude that NVIDIA can continue to makes chipsets compatible with Nehalem architecture, and to conclude that Intel has breached the license, or at least acted in bad faith, and award damages to NVIDIA accordingly.
"NVIDIA did not initiate this legal dispute," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA, in the press release. "But we must defend ourselves and the rights we negotiated for when we provided Intel access to our valuable patents. Intel's actions are intended to block us from making use of the very license rights that they agreed to provide."
Just as with the Intel/AMD cross license dispute, it's hard to form a judgment one way or the other without full access to the facts. You do have to wonder what Intel's motives are for trying to terminate NVIDIA's rights after only four years, especially as it still wants to keep its own rights from the agreement.
However, if the agreement is limited to certain CPU architectures then Intel would appear to be merely exercising its legal rights. It's in the hands of the courts now.
UPDATE - 17:30 27 March 2009
We asked Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy for a comment on this story and received the following response.
This counter claim highlights what we said when we filed our case for declaratory judgment. The two companies strongly disagree over the terms of the license. We tried, both Intel and Nvidia, for well over a year to resolve this matter. That effort failed so we filed our case and they have replied. We are simply asking the court to rule on what the license says. Nothing more.
