Nvidia Initiates Patent Lawsuit Against Samsung and Qualcomm

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Nividia looking to block shipments of Samsung products

It appears that Samsung is in for some rough times ahead. Nividia announced today that it has filed a patent lawsuit against Samsung and Qualcomm with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court in Delaware.
On its blog, Nvidia claims that Samsung mobile phones and tablets contain Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali, or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures. To that effect, the company is requesting that the ITC block shipments of Samsung’s mobile phones and tablets and ask that it be awarded damages from the Delaware court for the patent infringements.
Nvidia provided a list of Samsung products it says falls under patent infringements which includes products include the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4 mobile phones; and the Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro and Galaxy Tab 2 computer tablets. These devices use Qualcomm’s mobile processors such as the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801 and 805.
“Without licensing NVIDIA’s patented GPU technology, Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to deploy our IP without proper compensation to us,” said Shannon. “This is inconsistent with our strategy to earn an appropriate return on our investment.”
According to Nvidia executive vice-president David Shannon, the GPU manufacturer approached Samsung to reach an agreement but Samsung responded that this was mostly its suppliers’ problem.
Of the 7,000 issued and pending patents Nvidia has under its belt, Shannon says the company has chosen seven of those to bring up in these cases against Samsung and Qualcomm saying, “Those patents include our foundational invention, the GPU, which puts onto a single chip all the functions necessary to process graphics and light up screens; our invention of programmable shading, which allows non-experts to program sophisticated graphics; our invention of unified shaders, which allow every processing unit in the GPU to be used for different purposes; and our invention of multithreaded parallel processing in GPUs, which enables processing to occur concurrently on separate threads while accessing the same memory and other resources.”
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