Published in Graphics

Nvidia, Jensen joins EU against Intel

by on20 May 2009

ImageImage

Nvidia hopes Intel will be fair

Nvidia wants to ride the victory joy wave as its tough competitor AMD has won a big EU antitrust case against Intel. EU thinks that Intel is a nasty and unfair player and therefore it fined it with a massive €1.06 billion. Nvidia obviously agrees as it cannot get the X58 chipset license and Intel doesn’t really welcome Ion supporters with open arms.

Nvidia’s leader Jensen Huang has seen this as a great opportunity to voice out that if you buy and Atom chip itself you have to pay $45 but in a three-chip bundle, you get it for $25.

"That seems pretty unfair," Jensen said to Routers. "We ought to be able to compete and serve that market."

Intel was fast to respond with a following statement. "We compete fairly. We do not force bundles on any computer makers and customers can purchase Atom individually or as part of the bundle. "If you want to purchase the chip set, obviously there is better pricing," said an Intel spokesperson.

Intel is quite right about this one, and Intel forces its platforms for at least a few past years and you definitely get a better price if you buy Core 2 based CPU, Intel’s chipset and wireless LAN. Last time we checked Intel was calling this Centrino and this nice single name for three Intel chips is selling really successfully. We don’t see much difference with Atom and nettop platforms, except it angers Intel if you buy Ion and try to sell it, unless you are as big and arrogant as Acer, that you stop caring about tiny little Nvidia.

Nvidia doesn’t plan any legal action but it comes as a complete surprise that Pineview, future Atom that should be available in Q4 2009 as a dual and in Q1 2010 as a new nettop single core will have support for Nvidia Ion. You can read it here.

Have in mind that it took the EU and AMD over nine years to get to the end of a legal battle where Intel was fined and has to pay €1.06 billion, and we wonder if Nvidia has that much time, as Via didn’t. Nine years is 36 quarters, and you have to make money in most of them to stay in business for that long. VIA lost all of its chipset market share to Intel due to a chipset licensing dispute, and a few years after the start of legal battle VIA won the legal case but in the mean time it lost complete market share in Intel chipset and with a years to come it dropped out of that business completely.

Jensen was poetic to Reuters where he said “We really hope this company (Intel) will compete on a fair basis.” Moreover, we wonder about the meaning of word fair on planet earth in the middle of year 2009. 
Last modified on 20 May 2009
Rate this item
(0 votes)