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Over a twelvemonth agone, Nvidia sued both Qualcomm and Samsung, alleging that they had infringed on its GPU patents and requesting that the International Trade Commission (ITC) ban all imports of devices containing ARM Mali, Adreno, or PowerVR processors. On Friday, ITC administrative judge Thomas Pender handed down a ruling slapping downwards Nvidia's claims of patent infringement. Of the three patents that Nvidia claims Qualcomm and Samsung violated, two were ruled non-infringing, while the third was ruled invalid under the and so-chosen "obviousness" test.

This marks a significant setback for Nvidia's legal efforts, though the company noted in a blog mail service that information technology intends to ask the full commission to review the decision and non to throw out the tertiary patent (the 6,690,372 patent). That patent covers "shadow mapping while rendering a primitive in a graphics pipeline." Pender's determination (Google cache) institute that while Adreno, PowerVR, and Mali GPUs violate claims 23 and 24 of the '372 patent, the patent is invalid because the method described in Claims 23 and 24 isn't novel. Those 2 claims describe a organisation in which a texture module is continued to a shader module and retrieves information using texture coordinates.

Pender's ruling suggests that Nvidia's construed patent claims were likewise broad to exist valid, and while the visitor tin can appeal the decision to the full ITC, that body'southward rulings typically reflect the determination of the original presiding gauge.

Why's Nvidia on the patent warpath?

The fundamental problem with Nvidia'due south patent assertions — the visitor claims to have invented the GPU, programmable shading, unified shaders, and multi-threaded parallel processing in GPUs — is that all of these tin exist credibly claimed to have existed long before Nvidia came on the scene. It's true that Nvidia implemented the first hardware T&L engine in a consumer GPU, for example, but that doesn't mean Nvidia is legally entitled to financial compensation for information technology. I'yard non a patent lawyer and don't pretend to exist, only I suspect that patents filed by companies similar SGI could be used to argue against such broad awarding of Nvidia's patent portfolio.

As for the reason why Nvidia is aggressively hunting for new licensing revenue, well, that's thanks to Intel. Dorsum in 2011, Intel and Nvidia signed a multi-year patent agreement in which Chipzilla would pay Team Green $1.v billion over five years, first in 2011. That agreement has tacked a salubrious $66 million per quarter on to Nvidia's bottom line, and it's cash that the company wants to supplant with new licensing agreements. Unfortunately, those agreements don't seem to have materialized. Intel has announced that it will support Adaptive Sync rather than licensing Nvidia's G-Sync, while this new determination will hamper any take chances of coming to terms with Samsung and Qualcomm.

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The $66 million per quarter that Nvidia receives from Intel isn't a make-or-pause for the company, merely the nautical chart to a higher place shows only how nice a plumage it's been. At ~$264 million per twelvemonth, Nvidia's net income has been significantly larger than information technology would've been otherwise. Given the hammering that Tegra has taken over the same catamenia, i could argue that patent licensing cushioned the impact of the automotive and deep learning pivots and abroad from the consumer smartphone and tablet markets.

Samsung is notwithstanding bringing suit against Nvidia for its own alleged infringements of Samsung patents, but nosotros expect both of these cases to likely vanish into the ether. Samsung's lawsuit was a response to Nvidia's initial, and Nvidia is angling for licensing revenue — not seriously defending xi year-erstwhile patents from supposed infringement by a company that uses 3rd-party GPU IP rather than developing its own. It may accept fabricated sense for NV to bring adapt against Qualcomm, since Qualcomm develops its ain graphics hardware, but Samsung licenses other solutions and doesn't build its own architectures.