War between Nvidia and Samsung gets ugly

Newspaper Seller, 1939The war between Samsung and Nvidia has escalated and handbags are being distributed to the troops.

Samsung says that Nvidia has infringed several of its semiconductor-related patents and for making false claims about its products. This is a counter-suit following Nvidia’s lawsuit against the Korean company in September.

Samsung, which filed its lawsuit on Monday, is seeking damages for deliberate infringement of several technical patents, including a few that govern the way semiconductors buffer and use data.

Samsung said that Nvidia is guilty of false advertising when it says its “Shield” tablet sports the world’s fastest mobile processor, the Tegra. Samsung cites benchmarking studies performed by researchers at Primate Labs as proving that claim false.

Nvidia said it would review and respond to these new claims against it, and looked forward to presenting its case on how Nvidia GPU patents are being used without a licence.

Nvidia also pointed to a benchmarking study that supported its claim that the Tegra was the fastest mobile processor on the market.

Everyone knows that industry claims that “our chip is faster because we use x benchmark” always goes nowhere. It will be interesting to see what a court will make of them.