And here we go again! Another patent court case to keep the ‘Average Joe’ entertained – this time it isn’t Apple however.
NVIDIA have come out of the blocks swinging on their front foot, filing lawsuits against Samsung and Qualcomm – claiming that they’re infringing upon NVIDIA graphics chip patents. If they’re successful, they want Samsung Galaxy phone shipments to be stopped until patent licencing fees are paid.
A blog post outlined all the thoughts and information from NVIDIA’s perspective, with them saying they tried contacting Samsung to sort this issue out behind the scenes, but unfortunately nothing came to fruition. David Shannon, NVIDA Chief Administrative Officer, stated “Samsung repeatedly said that this was mostly their suppliers’ problem.”
Qualcomm’s chips and GPU’s aren’t located within only Samsung Galaxy devices however, so what does that mean for them if NVIDIA is victorious? We’ll have to wait and see.
As far as what products NVIDIA are directly targetting, they’ve listed: the Galaxy Note, Note Pro, Note 3, Tab S, Tab Pro, Tab 2, Galaxy S III, S4, S5, Infuse 4G, and the Samsung Illusion. Claims have been made that these models of devices are infringing upon seven NVIDIA patents, including: The entire concept of the GPU, or a dedicated graphics processing chip, programmable shading, unified shading and multithreaded processing on a GPU.
All of these points seem pretty basic in the scheme of things, but a patent is a patent. The lodged patent claim can be seen in full, along with the lawsuit.
Stay tuned to eTeknix for any developing information.
Image courtesy of WCCF tech
