Now that you have read Josh's article detailing the new Maxwell based Tegra X1 you might be wondering what products it could appear in, apart from an updated Shield. DigiTimes has a theory based on the current lawsuits against Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm which claim that those companies have infringed several fairly basic patents which NVIDIA holds including object texture, lighting, shading, GPGPU and vertex operators. If the lawsuits were successful the cost of purchasing chips from those two competitors could increase making the new Tegra X1 a more financially attractive product, even with the associated costs of changing hardware. If the power and performance expectations of the new mobile Maxwell chip are met then NVIDIA's new chip could also become a more attractive alternative for vendors as it could well outpace the next generation of chips from Qualcomm and Samsung regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits. If you like speculation you can peek in at DigiTimes posting here.
"To find new outlets for its GPU business, Nvidia has started licensing its GPU architecture to other application processor (AP) designers. Kepler was the first GPU platform Nvidia offered for licensing and its latest-generation Maxwell will also become available for licensing later."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Breathe New Life Into Payphones with Asterisk @ Hack a Day
- Nest Will Now Work With Your Door Locks, Light Bulbs and More @ Slashdot
- By the power of Xbox, WE HAVE THE POWER! – Leakers publish One's SDK @ The Register
- Windows market share figures are all over the shop as XP grows five percent @ The Inquirer
- Sony grovels, offers freebies after PlayStation network spent Xmas TITSUP @ The RegisterE
- KitGuru Annual Awards 2014
It could also go south and
It could also go south and Nvidia found guilty of infringing on Samsung patents.
ITC Will Probe Samsung Complaint of Patent Infringement Against NVIDIA
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/22861/20141224/itc-will-probe-samsung-complaint-of-patent-infringement-against-nvidia.htm
Dire future indeed.
Dire future indeed.
Complete and utter Bullshit.
Complete and utter Bullshit. This lawsuit if actually successful will take YEARS to come to a fruitful end for Nvidia (i personally think they will not prevail). Only then and only then could Nvidia leverage those patents on their competitors. Until then Nvidias Tegra branch will have a very hard time if they can’t get some major design wins with 10s of millions of volume.
And don’t forget Samsung will obviously appeal, again and again.
Look at Apple vs. Samsung. All the sweet Apple patents have now plenty of holes, where there were “claims”.
Nvidia is going after Samsung
Nvidia is going after Samsung and Qualcomm.
Samsuns going after Biostar, Elitegroup, EVGA, Fuhu, Jaton, Mad Catz, OUYA, Sparkle Computer, Toradex, Wikipad and ZOTAC.
There is a good possibility some of these companies cant afford the financial burden of years of litigation. Their relationship with Nvidia will strain and might cause them to look else where to minimize their risk exposure. Some might even fold up shop completely and Nvidia will have less people to sell to.
Nvidia’s biggest problem is
Nvidia’s biggest problem is still LTE in the US which qaulcom owns. Until big ones come to ignore the US carriers when they design their phones, tegra will remain a very niche soc.
No one with a brain would
No one with a brain would want to license IP from Nvidia, for sure their SOCs make nice Tablet SOCs, but Nvidia’s IP licensing terms are too restrictive, and probably are not as flexable, or as widely supported in the tablet market as ARM/PowerVR licensing based SOC products. Apple is happy with their PowerVR licensing, and the flexibility it offers, the A8X’s GPU has 2 extra execution cores/blocks that Imagination Technology’s did not officially offer in its lineup, the PowerVR GX6650, only officially offered 6 core GPU, but IT and Apple were able to create a customized variant that offered 8 GPU cores, so IT’s licensing for Apple is pretty flexable, and IT is partly owned by Apple. Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR wizard is an impressive GPU, that offers hardware Ray Tracing, and PowerVR 7 series GPUs have even more specialized functionality with options for FP 64 bit, should a customer want the PowerVR GPU for high precision graphics and other workloads. Nvidia is more like Intel, with its take what we give you attitude. Nvidia is not yet established as a player in the licensed IP market, with ARM, and Qualcomm, and others, Imagination Technologys is now, via its purchase of MIPS, producing 64 bit MIPS ISA based designs, with options for SMT, and other features. Nvidia’s lawsuits will not make them a more attractive company to do business with, and now with the X1 Nvidia has returned to using the reference design ARM A57/A53 cores, with some Nvidia IP added. So Nvidia is suing Samsung Electronics over ARM’s Mali GPU architecture, in hopes that Nvidia will get more business selling its GPU IP, but what about Imagination Technologies PowerVR products, Samsung could use that, or make some of its own.
Nvidia is not big enough to sue everybody, and Samsung is no small outfit, and what about ARM the makers of the Mali GPU architecture that Nvidia is suing Samsung over, what is Nvidia thinking. Nvidia needs to be very careful with its patents, especially if these patents maybe, on more thorough scrutiny, could be nullified, the patent process is not foolproof with regards to the issuing patents without doing a complete research, and some prior art may just show up to bring questions into the validity of Nvidia’s IP.