Nvidia Did Not Invent The (Modern) GPU – ITC Court Rules In Samsung’s Favor

[Threepwood]

We've been through this... ** No competitor price hinting ** or you can just use windows for free and reinstall every 3 months. Plus you can pay £40 for a decent k/b and mouse bundle.

Making my build £670 with a 390 and an i5K.

You cannot include the screen either ~ you have to buy a screen for both.

but a 380 is already not a great 1080P GPU

But a 7790 (XBONE GPU) and a 7870 (PS4 GPU) are?

What? I'll take the rebranded 285 over both of those if I had to and could not quite afford the 390.

 

[nashathedog]

** No price hinting **

The thing to also remember is 99% of houses will want a pc as well as a console for all the things your console wont do so there's another aspect you can save through.

At the end of the day they both have there place, For example I am a PC gamer but I recently decided I need to get a PS4 for the exclusives I haven't played, My last console was a PS2 so games like the Last of us onwards I have never played but want to.

When the option is there I will buy on the PC but there's plenty of games that are console only and make them worth the price.

 

[nashathedog]

Before Nvidia there was only The Darkness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hi_kzzSXhY&ab_channel=TheDarkness


ewww hard times

Thankfully there all gone now.

 

[Orangey]

Thank you based judge

 

[Orangey]

Charlie has posted his detailed analysis:

https://semiaccurate.com/2015/10/12/nvidia-patent-licensing-devastated-itc-ruling/

In the two plus years since Nvidia became a patent troll, SemiAccurate has been following it closely. We have named the terms, the ‘potential licensees’, and brought you the news of many related updates and changes. The “licensing program” has had its terms reduced to less than a third of the initial offer, has targeted every player in the industry small or large, and in general turned over every rock possible. The licensee count still stands at zero for a good reason, there is nothing real to actually license.

Worse yet Nvidia seems to have voluntarily pulled most of the claims over the summer, something that strongly suggests that these too were about to be invalidated. This ITC move has been nothing short of a full-blown disaster for Nvidia’s patent licensing opportunities, and it is a self-inflicted one at that. Given the value the company assigns to these patents, how much did this just cost them?

So now more than two years into the patent license/troll/war we have an actual ruling. It has quite simply removed almost half of Nvidia’s asserted patents from play and probably would have done so to more had the company not pulled them prior to the ruling. It also destroyed one entirely and another partially just like SemiAccurate has been predicting. Although there will be appeals, at the moment there is nothing leading us to believe they will do anything more than enrich various legal teams. We still stick by our well researched opinion that these suits are nothing more than an ill-thought out base patent trolling scheme without any underlying merit.

Sounds like there might be some belt-tightening in the wake of this.

 

[humbug]

Well, now Nvidia can't run around pointing fingers saying "you owe me money because we invented everything you're doing"

I wonder if Nvidia are already charging money to people for licensing fees they have no claim to, it'd be funny as ____ if they did and now lost that.

 

[smilertoo]

At the very least SGI must have done everything before nvidia, they were the goto gfx people back then.

 

[Steampunk]

I think Nvidia were taking a bit of a chancer by taking prior art, putting it together on one chip and then trying to claim this was not obvious and therefore worthy of patenting. It's not far off patenting every letter and then claiming ownership of all written works.

I think Nvidia was hoping everyone would pay up, and that they could out-spend everyone else in court. Of course the people who you can't outspend and who will take you on are the same big conglomerates as Nvidia is - just as Samsung has done.

 

[bloodkil]

They are the Apple of the GPU world, nothing more than pathetic patent trolls that were hoping for a bit of extra cash. I'm glad the judge ruled against them.

 

[ALXAndy]

At the very least SGI must have done everything before nvidia, they were the goto gfx people back then.

I used to go to 3Dlabs back then

 

[layte]

I used to go to 3Dlabs back then

First IT company I worked for.

 

[ALXAndy]

First IT company I worked for.

hehe you didn't do RMA did you? I once sent back a old 8mb AGP card and they sent me a 32mb Oxygen retail boxed in its place.

To say I was very happy would be an understatement hehe I nearly peed my pants

 

[bru]

NVidia are idiots, why on earth try to take on Samsung, that was stupid beyond belief.

As for inventing the modern GPU, well right up until they tried to make money off it, I would have agreed and so would many others. Agreeing that the first modern GPU was the Geforce 256 wasn't a difficult choice and it didn't cost anyone anything, but no NVidia wanted to make money off of that, idiots.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Greed coupled with Tegra gaining zero traction in the market after billions spent on R&D overall gpu market shrinking by the year, losing out consoles entirely.

I mean you see Apple pull crap like lawsuits against Samsung, their single biggest and most important supplier, because they invented a rectangle with rounded corners.... and made money off it. In the absolutely insane American court system where you can get away with that kind of crap I can actually see why other people would try the same. There were several important differences, Apple are monumentally huge compared to Nvidia, losing their custom would cost Samsung too much to retaliate by refusing to manufacture parts for them so Apple were 'safe', likewise Samsung didn't want to spend too much winning and causing Apple to choose to go elsewhere.

Now even the american court system is getting a little irked with insane patent cases and Apple who won most of their early ones have been losing more lately. More reasonable outcomes have been starting to happen.

If Nvidia did this 5-8 years ago when Apple started this ****, they may well have won, today the chances were stacked against them and they had no where near the power nor political influence that Apple had to begin with.

 

[humbug]

Greed coupled with Tegra gaining zero traction in the market after billions spent on R&D overall gpu market shrinking by the year, losing out consoles entirely.

I mean you see Apple pull crap like lawsuits against Samsung, their single biggest and most important supplier, because they invented a rectangle with rounded corners.... and made money off it. In the absolutely insane American court system where you can get away with that kind of crap I can actually see why other people would try the same. There were several important differences, Apple are monumentally huge compared to Nvidia, losing their custom would cost Samsung too much to retaliate by refusing to manufacture parts for them so Apple were 'safe', likewise Samsung didn't want to spend too much winning and causing Apple to choose to go elsewhere.

Now even the american court system is getting a little irked with insane patent cases and Apple who won most of their early ones have been losing more lately. More reasonable outcomes have been starting to happen.

If Nvidia did this 5-8 years ago when Apple started this ****, they may well have won, today the chances were stacked against them and they had no where near the power nor political influence that Apple had to begin with.

Hmmmm... could this be it? can't beat them, or even join them, answer = try to stop them?

 

[bru]

Not so sure about that, Tegra may not have been the complete runaway success that NVidia would have liked or even have you believe it is, but I wouldn't say it is gaining zero traction.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Not so sure about that, Tegra may not have been the complete runaway success that NVidia would have liked or even have you believe it is, but I wouldn't say it is gaining zero traction.

The first couple of incarnations got in quite a lot of phones, loads of design wins, today the only design wins they are generally getting is their own. That is absolutely a lack of traction.

Problem is they burned the industry, promise a 3W chip and bring a 3.2W chip let alone a 5-6W chip and your design win(which is based on the final specs of the chip they are promised) turn into mothballed projects. When you have a 10-20 companies putting decent money into design wins of which only a few make it to market customers for your chips get wary. When the second gen does the same, you end up with less design wins each generation. Nvidia failed badly to turn design wins into final products, as a result getting far fewer customers with each generation.

When you move from announcing loads of customers at launch with loads of design wins to announcing a couple of your own products which are in a niche market with low sales... well, zero traction is fair. They've gone miles backwards from the interest they had from the industry since Tegra 1/2.

People don't trust them, MS and Sony reportedly refused to work with Nvidia again on a console. As with this thread, rather than work with the industry and their customers they've run around suing everyone and patent trolling.

Things like HSA are going to make mobile chips Samsung, Qualcomm or AMD offer for things like use in the car industry are going to leave Nvidia behind in technology and capability.

Car companies can ask any chip company to make a product made up of any IP blocks they want. AMD even provide this service directly with custom chip design. AMD gpu, ARM cores, their own IP block, it will mean different models can offer different versions of the chips, different capabilities using the same software. Can switch one gen from AMD, the next to Samsung without redoing all the software.

Nvidia has been boxing itself into the corner with Tegra rather than getting in line with the industry.

 

[Pottsey]

Not so sure about that, Tegra may not have been the complete runaway success that NVidia would have liked or even have you believe it is, but I wouldn't say it is gaining zero traction.

Ok perhaps not zero but next to zero traction and getting worse. Tegra had shrank by around 50% last time I looked and was running at a loss before it shank that much. Its got to the point Tegra is having a negative impact on the share price. Licensing and revenue form Tegra is the lowest its been in years. The last version of Tegra tablet chips sales was applauding low and worse the shield was overheating so badly they caused fires in houses and had to pay out. Tegra has failed at every market its in.

EDIT: Sales of Tegra products for OEM smartphones and tablets has decrease by 80%!

 

[Steampunk]

Hmmmm... could this be it? can't beat them, or even join them, answer = try to stop them?

That's been the case for years. If you can get a court to implement an import ban on your competitor for six months - well you've killed that generation of product with few sales before it gets replaced.

Patent cases are now corporate battles in the war between big companies.

 

[drunkenmaster]

That's been the case for years. If you can get a court to implement an import ban on your competitor for six months - well you've killed that generation of product with few sales before it gets replaced.

Patent cases are now corporate battles in the war between big companies.

The difference is when Apple gets a 6 month ban on products for Samsung people buy the Ipad by the millions and add millions.... when Nvidia do it they'd block Samsung products being sold, Nvidia would continue to sell 10's or even 100's of of Shield's, while everyone just again goes and buys Apple products.

It's a bit nuts to spend potentially 10s of millions in lawyer fees on multi year long cases when your initial selling volume is rubbish, when blocking some imports would really at best move sales from one competitor to another and not improve your bottom line.

I mean it's been described by certain analysis of the situation as making a big show, if you're willing to spend money going after a Samsung sized company then you hope all the smaller companies you go after throw money at you to obtain licenses to prevent being sued. Somehow this is legal, it's pretty much extortion, even blackmail... pay this license fee or we'll spend millions taking you to court and bankrupt you. Can't bankrupt Samsung nor really win, but could intimidate much smaller companies into playing ball.