SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it has filed a countersuit in the Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware against Intel Corporation for breach of contract. The action also seeks to terminate Intel's license to NVIDIA's valuable patent portfolio.
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NVIDIA's countersuit was brought in response to a filing by Intel last month in the Delaware court, alleging that the four-year-old chipset license agreement does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as its Nehalem processor.
"NVIDIA did not initiate this legal dispute," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. "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."
NVIDIA entered into the disputed agreement in 2004 to bring platform innovations to Intel CPU-based systems. In return, Intel took a license to NVIDIA's rich portfolio of 3D, GPU, and other computing patents. NVIDIA had been attempting for more than a year to resolve the disagreement with Intel in a fair and reasonable manner.
To read Intel's initial filing, go to(1):
www.nvidia.com/object/io_1238021549708.html
To read NVIDIA's response and counterclaim, go to(1): www.nvidia.com/object/io_1238021621363.html
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce(R) products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro(R) products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla(TM) products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.
Copyright (C) 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, GeForce, Tesla and Quadro are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to NVIDIA's patent portfolio; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-K for the fiscal period ended January 25, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our Web site and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
(1) There may be an initial delay in accessing these documents due to the court-registration process.
Web site: http://www.nvidia.com/