Raising the stakes
Graphics giant NVIDIA has launched a portal - The Case For Innovation - which is designed to bring further public attention to the many legal actions, past and present, against Intel for alleged anticompetitive behaviour.
The reason NVIDIA has taken this initiative is that legal action between itself and Intel is due to come to court later this year. It concerns Intel claims made over a year ago that NVIDIA isn't licensed to make chipsets for its latest generations of CPU.
NVIDIA thinks it is, and that Intel is only bringing the action because it's concerned about how desirable PCs running its cheap Atom CPU plus NVIDIA's ION graphics are for many consumers. If ION netbooks provide equivalent performance to low-end notebooks, then sales of Intel's more profitable full-fat chips could suffer.
On top of that, the previous cheerleader for antitrust action against Intel - AMD - was paid-off at the end of last year and so has moved-on to other things, like trying to make a profit. NVIDIA is arguing Intel is an abusive monopolist as part of its own legal action against it, so NVIDIA clearly has an interest in bringing attention to the other ongoing investigations into Intel's business practices.
You can see the portal here, and below we've embedded an interview NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang did with Fortune magazine last week in which he vows not to settle out of court and see the legal action through to the end.
