Wednesday, 08 February 2012 17:53

RAMBUS and nVidia settle long running patent dispute with a licensing agreement

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73One of the all-time largest patent trolls RAMBUS (yes even bigger than apple) has finally settled a long running battle with nVidia and signed a licensing agreement with the GPU and SoC manufacturer. RAMBUS is famous for its underhanded dealings in the mid-90s when the company filed patents on technology that was being openly discussed at JDEC conferences.  RAMBUS then turned around and sued other members of the organization for violating their patent rights. The resulting legal battle made the Samsung Vs. Apple dispute look like a fight over the TV remote.

In the end RAMBUS had many of the patents thrown out and lost a lot of money trying to profit from their duplicity. Now however, it looks like they might have learned from past mistakes. They are settling with nVidia instead of trying to drag this one out.

Of course the details are not public but we would be willing to bet they will allow nVidia to expand their SoC while RAMBUS will benefit from some of the technology that nVidia has put into their GPUs and SoC line (pretty easy to figure out). But more to the point it relieves the money being spent on this 3 year + legal battle both have been in.

It will be very interesting to see what nVidia comes out with in the near term for their Tegra line or if we see a new product line spin off from Tegra, while we know that nVidia does not currently have a license to make an x86 CPU, there is nothing saying they cannot get one in the near future. We already know that Intel is working on an x86 SoC and there is evidence to support that rumor that AMD is also working on one; we doubt nVidia would be left out in the cold for long once we actually see an x86 SoC hit the market and if both Intel and AMD have one… well you can figure that out for yourself.

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Read 2765 times Last modified on Wednesday, 08 February 2012 18:16

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