Nvidia may have Intel Pentium 4 licence for nothing

THE AGREEMENT between Nvidia and Intel to sign a "broad" cross licensing agreement is generating a whirlwind of rumours about the deal, largely because neither company will elaborate on the sparse two or three lines in the joint press release they issued last week.

There's no-one more paranoid in the IT industry than chip companies, and when we asked Nvidia to comment on whether it would pay Intel a Pentium 4 licence fee, the firm's response was along the following bottom-clenching lines:

"Unfortunately, we are not disclosing specifics of any particulars of the cross license or FSB license agreement. We are also not disclosing product details at this time. We will do that in the future."

But we're hearing from some sources that Nvidia won't pay anything to Intel for at least the first year for a Pentium 4 licence. And the reason for that could be because Intel fears that Dell will plump for AMD chips and it would rather do a deal with Nvidia than with the other chipset manufacturers, mostly ATI, of course.

The truth is that Nvidia has wanted to do a chipset for Intel for some years now. At times, it has waved its SNAP (Strategic Nvidia AMD Programme) chipset willy in the air and leaks have somehow got into the public domain.

One of the best of these was that Nvidia would just go ahead and make a Pentium 4 chipset anyway - it didn't need to get a licence from Intel, because of a whole series of cross licence deals with IBM Microelectronics.

Readers will recall that Via pressed ahead and made Pentium 4 chipsets without paying any royalties to Intel. It believed that patents in its possession which it had through a complex series of relationships which started with Cyrix - a company that successfully beat off a series of Intel patent infringement lawsuits - would indemnify it from the need for a licence.

Those attempts came to naught. In the end, Via and Intel released one of those bland press releases which said both firms had agreed to settle all outstanding lawsuits, resulting in the Taiwanese company ending up paying royalties for a Pentium 4 licence.

But if it is indeed true that Nvidia won't be paying for an Intel Pentium 4 licence - and for that matter Intel will be receiving all sorts of goodies from the graphics firm, that's going to really put the cat amongst the pigeons.

So far, ATI, Via, SIS and ULI pay money to Intel to have the chip giant thwack them because it means motherboards using their chipsets cost a lot more than the ones Chipzilla sells. Intel doesn't, of course, need to pay a Pentium 4 licence to itself.

The other Intel chipset customers will be livid, if it's true Nvidia hasn't paid a red cent.

There may be also be a quid pro quo too. Our sources tell us, that if Dell does adopt AMD chips, it may only be in a limited range of servers with the Opteron. And Intel felt it might just have to go to Nvidia and say: "Oh, please do have a Pentium 4 licence. And let's do a deal on graphics technology while we're at it". µ

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