Nvidia and Intel team up.

[SkullHozer]

The Info:

Nvidia and Intel announced an agreement Friday to license technology to each other after years of difficult negotiations.

Under the deal, Nvidia for the first time will have the right to make chipsets for personal computers that use Intel microprocessors. That opens up a huge market to Nvidia, which to date only has made chipsets for PCs using Advanced Micro Devices microprocessors.

Chipsets are pairs of chips in computers that are like traffic cops inside the PC, routing data to memory or to the microprocessor. In many low-cost machines, graphics chips are integrated into the chipset.

"The timing was right for this agreement,'' said Drew Henry, general manager of nForce chipsets at Nvidia in Santa Clara.

Henry said Nvidia plans to enter the Intel chip set market in the first fiscal quarter that ends in April.

The Nvidia-Intel agreement also includes a broad patent cross license, which means the companies can make chips without fear of treading on each other's patents. However, the exact terms of that cross license are confidential.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said the negotiations for the deal lasted for months, though the companies have had on-and-off talks for a number of years. Both sides declined to describe the terms of the agreement.

Jon Peddie, president of market researcher Jon Peddie Research, said it is likely Nvidia will have to pay Intel a royalty for each Intel chipset that it sells. Even so, he said, the deal could offer big financial gains for Nvidia.

Desktop chipsets with integrated graphics are a $1.2 billion market, according to Peddie. Because Nvidia largely was shut out of that market, it was at a disadvantage even though it held much of the stand-alone graphics chip market.

Santa Clara-based Intel dominates the integrated graphics chipset market, followed by companies that have licensed Intel technology, including Via Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems, Acer Labs and ATI Technologies.

Nvidia's entry could shake up the market. Nvidia began competing in the AMD integrated graphics chipset market three years ago and took a large share, Henry said.

"This puts Nvidia on an equal footing against ATI,'' Peddie said.

Richard Brown, director of marketing at Taiwan's Via, said Nvidia had to get the license because of the shift to low-cost computers, which has prompted a huge shift from stand-alone graphics chips. Those chips once accounted for 70 percent of the graphics chip market. Now integrated graphics chipsets have a 70 percent share of the market.

"The market is going to be more crowded next year,'' he said.

Could be usefull...

[TitanKing]

Wow, it seems like Intel finaly realised they are being left behind, good for them.