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.

Out of ideas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sue the competition!

Easy

[ArcadeMan]

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

Re:

[CajunArson]

Samsung: So big that it patent trolls itself.

Re: Say what now?

[Selivanow]

Grammar has no place here.

Re:

[koreanbabykilla]

Are you gonna fix your retarded headline samzenpus? Do you even read the dumb shit you write before you add it to the front page? I wish everyone would just move to soylentnews, much better editing over there.

Re:

[koreanbabykilla]

I am not paid to edit a largish news site...

Re:

[koreanbabykilla]

I'm glad I could brighten your day :D

Re:

[soccerisgod]

I wish everyone would just move to soylentnews, much better editing over there.

Why? Are you so bored you have to come whine here if you have a better place? I don't get it.

Re:

[Jeff Flanagan]

What's not to get? He's trying to drive traffic to a non-corporate site that's trying to be what Slashdot once was before Dice came along.

Re:

[koreanbabykilla]

I like the comments here, and there are currently not enough commenters over there. Better editing, but way less comments, so I use both. doesn't mean I cant talk shit. This is the internet after all...

When

[invictusvoyd]

O when Am I going to get my free software phone with free software cellular network :(

Re:

[Arker]

Unfortunately that is blocked indefinitely by the failure of the court system to understand that software is math. I used to expect the next generation of judges at least would get it, but seeing a whole new generation coming out that is even less technically savvy than their predecessors kind of dashes that hope.

Re:

[gl4ss]

Because phones and cellular networks are entirely software

pretty much yeahm they wouldn't do any parallel gpu processing unless instructed with software and they hardly invented parallel processing as such.

they're just pissed off because nobody wants to use NVIDIA's soc.. coming soon, watch samsung release a phone with nvidia designed chip, as a token release - and bury it with their other phone releases. kind of how they produced windows phones for surprisingly long - not that they put any effort into selling them or anything but at least they got something back

Re:

[qbast]

Ah yes, and every material invention is just application of physics.

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

Which do you not understand? Software or math?

Re:

[Ravaldy]

Software is math but you could also say the same about anything that was ever invented. At the end of the day everything is math.

One of my observations over years of watching and listening to software patent trolling is that nobody makes the difference between actual research and the coding. Coding is coding and implementing an existing concept to another existing concept is just more coding UNLESS research is required to achieve the final objective. The key here is that there should be an amount of researc

Re:

[Ravaldy]

So your telling me there's a difference between putting intellectual knowledge in a computer program versus on paper?

At the end of the day research is research. Whether is results in a material good or not is irrelevant.

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:

[Lord Maud'Dib]

Well said. I feel dirty now that I had to buy an Nvidia GPU recently because the software package I use only supports CUDA acceleration :(

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:

[ChunderDownunder]

+5 Informative???

We're talking about mobile device SoCs here, where AMD don't even compete.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Qualcomm's GPU core, Adreno, is actually something Qualcomm purchased from ATi/AMD when they spun off their mobile division. Long ago ATi was doing mobile GPUs before NVidia and Intel were doing them (and before they became commonplace when graphics were still mostly software driven).

Anyhow, I suppose NVidia was in trouble - they had a popular SoC and their subsequent ones have failed to capitalize on it (remember when practically all Android tablets had NVidia Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs?).

Interesting article on Semiaccurate about this

[edxwelch]

Previously, Nvidia said [nvidia.com] that it would license it's Kepler GPU cores to third parties. Semiaccurate maintains [semiaccurate.com] that this licensing program was in fact bogus and was conceived purely to justify future patent trolling activities. Semiaccurate also claims that
Nvidia tried to "shakedown" Apple with the same patents and Apple subsequently gave the contract for the Mac Pro GPU to AMD as punishment.

So..

[synapse7]

Is nvidia using patents on commonplace patents to get a piece of the pie they are jealous the don't have. Or are these legitimate patents and said companies are willfully stealing technology?
 
Keep in mind my next purchases for video cards and cell phones will depend on the answer..

Re:

[ArcadeMan]

Still, talking out of your ass is quite impressive. I haven't seen that since 1994 [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[flayzernax]

Sounds like a bunch of retarded mongoloid nvidia fanbois begrudgingly agree with me as AC's. The idea of a shader model is nothing new boys and girls....... If I stampted it into a peice of metal and used a flywheel with a needle to read the algorithm in. It wouldn't exactly be innovation now would it? Maybe artistic. But hardly innovative.

Re:

[Calibax]

This isn't patent trolling. nVidia literally invented the GPU and much shader technology back in the 1990s. A lot of graphic stuff now considered basic was developed and patented by nVidia.

These are probably legitimate patents that other companies are using without a license. One of the reasons that Intel graphics technology is still far behind is that they are coming late to the graphics game and have a patent minefield to avoid. It looks like Qualcomm and Samsung decided to ignore the minefield and h

Re:

[Fjandr]

Much of what they do would never have been possible to implement in software, because it would take a billion years to complete the operations. Therefore, nobody wrote software to do what Nvidia does in hardware.

Re:

[chowdahhead]

My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo, and shortly after that a Riva TNT, which wasn't anything special at the time. Back then, I remember there were many more consumer GPU manufacturers, and almost all of them were bringing new features to GPU's. The naming of OGL extensions reflected that. Years before everyone else, 3DFX was doing SLI, ATI had primitive hardware tessellation and the first unified shader arch, and Savage created gpu texture compression. The modern GPU wasn't invented by NVidia, but by cont

Re:So..

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

I don't know if the patents legitimate or not. They could be legitimate (ie approved by some patent office and not yet invalidated by a court) and still be bad patents. But a high-profile IT company that starts filing patent law suits can only mean one thing, the company has peaked and is on its way down. So maybe you should start looking for your graphic card and cellphones elsewhere? (AMD suing Intel is a different thing, since it concerns Intel's supposed monopolistic business practices.)

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

" But a high-profile IT company that starts filing patent law suits can only mean one thing, the company has peaked and is on its way down. "

Actually there is another thing it could mean. It could mean somebody is violating their patents. Had that possibility not occured to you?

Re:

[ArcadeMan]

Is it really? I see nVidia heading giving better performance per watt for a reasonable cost (Maxwell) while AMD has power-hungry, heat-dissipating GPUs that are only useful for the "uber-gamer" who wants 5% more performance at the cost of three times the power and twice the price.

Re:

[Parker Lewis]

Yeap, you didn't realize this story is related to mobile, not desktop.

Re:

[Fjandr]

And in mobile, Nvidia has the fastest graphics operations. Just look at the Shield.

Re:

[jrumney]

Its their last gasp in the mobile market. Their strategy has been to support their own SoC by not licensing their graphics core to anyone else, so now that they've failed to gain much traction for their ARM SoCs, they're left with nothing. If they'd focused on their core technology, they could have cleaned up by licensing their GPU cores to other manufacturers, so now some pointy haired type has come up with a scheme to make up for lost time by suing everyone who they've been refusing to license their tec

Re:

[bytestorm]

Just curious, has anyone done a gpu power/performance comparison of Imagination Technology's powervr and Nvidia's tegra platforms recently? I don't know that they would clean up by licensing their IP out; it seems to me Nvidia stuff has always been more performance focused than power conscious which is something that is extremely hard to sell in the mobile segment.

Re:

[ArcadeMan]

Would it be possible to see laptop and desktop class PowerVR GPUs in the future? Would a PowerVR be a better choice for something like the Macbook Air or a Mac nano the size of an Apple TV?

This is not patent trolling.

[flowerp]

nVidia holds a lot of patents in the fields of graphics technology - it is a major player in this field and to date has a large market share in the desktop amd mobile GPU market. This is absolutely no patent trolling.

It's just the usual insane patent wars among major players in technology. I highly doubt this will go to court. There will just be a quiet agreement among the parties involved before this escalates too much.

Re:

[jedidiah]

The fact that it isn't a pure Troll doesn't mean it isn't trollling. We can neither accept these at face value nor dismiss them out of hand. It's something that actually requires a little thought and analysis.

Certainly the "moron on the street" standard should not apply here.

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

" It's something that actually requires a little thought and analysis."

No. It doesn't require any thought actually. The problem with your statement stems from your lack of understanding of the term "Patent Troll [wikipedia.org]."

Trying to get bought out?

[Erich]

It's common knowledge that nvidia is having a hard time of things. They cancelled their server chip and their mobile devices are going nowhere. Discrete graphics cards aren't the market they used to be; and certainly not a growth industry. Maybe they're trying to get bought by Qualcomm or Samsung... there aren't many companies that are big enough to be able to absorb them and have it make any kind of sense. I wouldn't be surprised to see them sue Intel also.

Suing the companies that might be able to buy y

Re:

[Nemyst]

You mean aside from the fact Intel has patent agreements with Nvidia? It's pretty clear to me that Nvidia's trying very hard to increase their share in the mobile market and one way to do it is to get some cash from competitors through licensing agreements. Or maybe they want some of Qualcomm's patents for their own products?

As per usual, /. ignores AnandTech's [anandtech.com] excellent overview of the situation.

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.

Re:

[Tmackiller]

I..I, um... what? Back to /b/ with you.

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.

Re:

[Richard_at_work]

You need to brush up on your understanding of patent law - people and entities merely using infringing items most certainly can be sued...

Re:

[bytestorm]

I'm specifically referencing exhaustion/first sale doctrine [wikipedia.org]. I believe that should apply, but as you pointed out, I could be wrong.

Re:

[Richard_at_work]

That only applies where the patent owner is the one selling the item, which is not what we are talking about here - check out the following line from that Wikipedia article:

A patent gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing into the U.S. the patented invention during the term of the patent

See the emphasis I have added.

Where a patented item is being sold by a third party to another third party, no exhaustion of rights exists - both parties

Re:

[bytestorm]

Ok, I think I now see where you are coming from here, as well as AC below you. Since Qualcomm didn't have a license, Samsung couldn't have triggered patent exhaustion because Qualcomm never had a license to exhaust. It's then open to court interpretation whether or not Samsung should be liable for use of the patent.

The difference between this case and Quanta v. LG (2008) [wikipedia.org] is that Qualcomm didn't have a patent license to sell their part. Even if Samsung is not practicing the patent itself, they might still

Re:

[Fjandr]

Yes, if Qualcomm negotiated for past use, Samsung would be protected from suit.

Re:

[jrumney]

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 thats where your idea of this business starts to unravel. Without the drivers, it could be that the Snapdragon does not violate any of those patents, any more than a bare Intel CPU violates the Amazon 1-click patent. And the same could be true for the software - w

Re:

[bytestorm]

That sounds amazingly convoluted and backward, but I don't doubt that's how it works.

However, if Qualcomm sells Samsung a part without licenses and separately licenses/sells/supports the driver software without licenses (I am dangerously assuming Samsung didn't write their own), conditionally saying the driver cannot be used with the part because that would be in violation of the patent, then Samsung uses them together and distributes it, why would not Qualcomm go to town on Samsung in the spirit of cove

Re:

[jrumney]

Business to business commerce is fundamentally different than consumer commerce. If you buy something as a consumer, it is reasonable to expect that all licensing etc is taken care of, and there are laws to protect you from liability (plus it would be prohibitively expensive to go after all the individual consumers rather than the manufacturer). But business to business, they can contract how they want when it comes to patents that only cover specific uses of a product, not the manufactured product itself

Re:

[Dixie_Flatline]

Some of the devices are powered by Samsung's Exynos chips, so Samsung probably stepped on the patents there. That's what I got out of it. Remember that Samsung doesn't just use other people's stuff--they do a lot of their own manufacturing when it suits them.

Re:

[andydread]

spoken from a true iTard apple fanboy.