Could Intel stop Nvidia from producing chips for Nehalem?

by Scott M. Fulton, III February 18, 2009

In a court filing Monday in Delaware which remains under seal, CPU maker Intel asked for a declaratory judgment against GPU and chipset producer Nvidia, stating that the terms of the companies' existing x86 technology license do not extend to the Nehalem generation. This according to Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, who confirmed the filing with Betanews this morning. Nehalem is the first architecture from Intel to use an embedded memory controller, which it calls QuickPath Interconnect (QPI); AMD has had a similar technology called HyperTransport for several years. That QPI radically changes the way graphics processors and motherboard chipsets -- the two key products Nvidia makes -- communicate with the CPU. In order for Nvidia to utilize some of its own key technologies, including its multi-GPU system called SLI, system builders believe Nvidia would need to make -- or to have already made -- radical changes in its own designs. In a July announcement, according to The Register, Nvidia indicated that it had already done so, and that Nehalem support was on its way. Intel's response has been negative toward that ever since, and it has just formalized that response in court.

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