Samsung has racheted up its
legal battles with Nvidia, bringing US regulators into the battle. Yesterday, the Korean manufacturer filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), attempting to block GPUs manufactured by Nvidia from being imported and sold in the US market. The complaint mirrors one that Nvidia filed against Samsung earlier this year, with Nvidia calling it "a predictable tactic."
According to Nvidia, Samsung snubbed licensing attempts, stating that it "was mostly their suppliers' problem." Shannon said that Nvidia decided to pursue its first-ever patent lawsuit as it went against company strategy, which is to "earn an appropriate return" on its $9 billion investment into research and development.
Samsung's suit was filed after Nvidia's, and accused the California company of infringing its patents and faking benchmark results for its processors. Nvidia claims that Samsung's accusations of benchmark deception is false, by comparing its Tegra K1-powered Shield Tablet against Samsung's Galaxy Note 4 and its Exynos 5433 processor. Samsung's pre-emptive complaint is dragging in Virginia-based PC manufacturer Velocity Micro seemingly solely to take advantage of the faster docket in the state for patent complaints.
Nvidia spokesperson Hector Marinez said of this week's filing that "we have not seen the complaint so can't comment, but we look forward to pursuing our earlier filed ITC action against Samsung products." A copy of the complaint is still not available, and specific chipsets have not yet been made public.
Nvidia made its request of the ITC to block shipments of any devices using Qualcomm's Adreno GPU, Imagination's PowerVR graphics architectures, and ARM's Mali technology in early October. Nvidia's request includes several tablets and smartphones from Samsung, including the Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Tab S and Galaxy Note Pro. Many of the devices utilize Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors like the 400, 800 and 805. Other devices are powered by the Samsung Exynos series of processors.
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