OneAndOneIs2

There's a reason why it's often not a good idea to get your opinion of legal matters from tabloids and magazines.

PCAuthority (Note that's not "LEGAL Authority") has picked up (Via The Inquirer and without attribution, I notice) on the fact that nVidia hired the engineers who left Intel a while ago to set up their own company, which failed. This move has been seen by many as the start of a move by nVidia to manufacture an x86 CPU, the type of processor that the overwhelming majority of the world's computers run on.

This move would make perfect sense, given the expected technology shift towards multi-core CPUs; and also given that their main competitors are Intel, who have manufactured both CPUs and GPUs, and ATI - a company that makes GPUs and recently merged with CPU-manufacturer AMD.

If you own a PC or laptop, you will almost certainly have at least one chip inside it made by Intel, AMD, ATI or nVidia.

PCA at this point explains that there are lots of patents covering the x86 chip, and nVidia doesn't have a license to use them, and is unlikely to get one from the companies that could issue one, because they're all competitors that don't like nVidia much.

Right.

That's reasoning on a par with somebody saying in 2003 "SCO doesn't stand a chance of getting to court with its claims against the Linux kernel, because Linux is open-source" - here we are six years later when it's been self-evident from the start that SCO didn't have a leg to stand on and the lawsuits are still ongoing, for all that they're utterly doomed.

So nVidia doesn't have a license to the x86 patents. So what?

nVidia has been working with x86 for years. They manufacture motherboard chipsets for the x86 CPUs. They manufacture processors. They know the x86 architecture very well. It's perfectly feasible to suggest that they might have patents that AMD and Intel are violating, that they could use as leverage to get cross-licensing.

Even if they have no x86-specific patents, so what? Intel and AMD both manufacture GPUs, and a big excuse from nVidia and ATI when it came to releasing FOSS drivers for their GPUs was the risk that it would expose patent violations to their competition. nVidia is almost certain to have GPU patents that ATI and Intel are in violation of, under threat of which they could very possibly force a licensing agreement for x86. It would make them very unpopular with their competitors, but then they already ARE unpopular with them. So what do they have to lose?

It's even possible, if not that likely, that they could make a decent x86 chip using only technology that is/was unpatented, unpatentable, patented but expired, and/or completely novel. x86 has been around since the late 70s and US patents last 20 years.

They could also take a leaf from AMD's book. AMD has repeatedly accused Intel of abusing their position as the main manufacturer of x86 chips: In 1992,
the court granted $10 million plus a royalty-free license to any Intel patents used in AMD's own 386-style processor. If it worked for AMD, then nVidia might be willing to gamble it would work for them too: If there are three big companies that make GPUs and two of them have cross-licensed vital technology to each other but shut the third firmly out, there's a very good chance that that could be argued to be unfair competition, monopoly (duopoly?) abuse, anti-trust violations, or whatever.

Or, of course, nVidia could simply have realised that if they don't have an x86 chip to offer then they're going to be wiped out and therefore their only survival strategy is to ignore the legalities and go for it. And this is a strategy that could work too. Let's face it, a company that made $4.1 billion last year is a company that could keep any lawsuits running for years before they could finally be definitively told to stop it.

The fact that it would be a clear-cut case doesn't matter. Just ask SCO - how long did they keep the lawsuit going before they even revealed which lines of code they alleged had been "stolen"? They were in court for YEARS with nothing but unsubstantiated allegations. And nVidia's got WAY more money than SCO ever did (SCO hasn't made a net profit in years)

It's true to say that it would be a good idea for nVidia to bring out their own x86 chip. It's true that they've hired the right people to be able to bring out their own x86 chip. It's true that they can't currently bring out their own x86 chip without violating a whole bunch of patents.

It's not true to say that they're stupid or doomed to even try. Legalities are never that simple.

There's a reason why many lawyers have written articles for magazines but no journalists have been asked to represent a big corporation in court.