NVIDIA Sues Qualcomm and Samsung Seeking To Ban Import of Samsung Phones

Calibax writes NVIDIA has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the ITC and in the U.S. District court in Delaware. The suit alleges that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing. NVIDIA is seeking damages and a ban on U.S. import of a number of devices with Snapdragon and Exynos processors until there is an agreement on licensing.

Switching to AMD

[StormReaver]

Thankfully, the Open Source AMD video driver has progressed enough to use it for normal computing. I've been using it on cards I already had laying around, and it performs very well for daily use. It performs much better than Nouveau (which isn't surprising, since AMD released full specifications, and nVidia requires complete clean-room reverse engineering), and integrates into a Linux desktop cleaner than the nVidia proprietary driver (nVidia destroys the boot display, for example).

Now I have enough motivation to no longer use nVidia. Thank you, nVidia, for helping AMD gain some ground.

Re:Switching to AMD

[jones_supa]

Rather surprisingly, I have also been quite happy with the developments of the open source Radeon driver under Linux. Works great and the performance is excellent.

Re:Here come the Samsung fanboys...

[bytestorm]

I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe Samsung is violating any of Nvidia's patents directly by using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 and 805 in a product. They received the part and associated driver software from QCOM as a final product and all components and features therein are protected from patent violations. Just like you can't be sued for violating Nvidia's patents by using an AMD GPU which has Nvidia-patented features in your PC, Samsung is protected by purchasing the part from QCOM. Nvidia could block further sales of the Snapdragon CPU to Samsung, but not sales of derived products; even though to to the end consumer it amounts to the same thing. So unless Samsung is violating their agreement with QCOM by enabling features they didn't license from QCOM, NV can't touch them here.

Similar deal with Exynos (Samsung's SOC) since it licenses the IP involved directly from ARM and Imagination Technologies (Mali and PowerVR GPUs respectively). Unless Samsung's legal team is collectively idiots and/or assholes, they should be protected by their upstream licensing agreements.

Then again, NV is never going to sue ARM because they would be in a seriously shitty position to renew *their* ARM licenses (if ARM didn't just terminate them on the spot) and then ARM would laugh all the way to the bank about who isn't shipping products.

Based on that, it's my opinion that Samsung shouldn't be involved in this lawsuit and Nvidia just pulled them in because that's where the money is.

hum, i call bullshit on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Henry Gouraud invented computer graphics shading 70's
1. Pixar Renderman 1988 Shading rendering, Programmable Shaders using cpu
2. Unified Shader by ATI :https://www.google.com/patents/US8760454
3. multithreaded parallel processing By INTEL http://www.google.ca/patents/USRE41849
4. Programmable Shaders Nvidia http://www.google.com/patents/US6664963 This one is questionable since it was done in software before gpu's

All these things were conceptualized in the 60's, 70's, 80's.