Samsung and Nvidia exchange Lawsuits

Samsung and Nvidia have served lawsuits at each other in an attempt to settle disagreements about alledged patent violations.


Published: November 12, 2014 9:15 AM /

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Samsung vs Nvidia Lawsuit Art

Not all companies get along, and it seems with Samsung and Nvidia, that may be becoming especially true these days. In September, Nvidia filed the first patent lawsuit in its 21-year history against Samsung over seven patents that Samsung and Qualcomm had allegedly infringed on.

Nvidia files lawsuit against Samsung

Nvidia has said on that front that it attempted to negotiate in good faith with Samsung to work out a deal on the matter and demonstrated why their patents applied. Samsung’s response to this, according to Nvidia, was to say it was their supplier's fault, and no deal was able to be reached. The lawsuit was filed in Delaware, and they are asking for the Samsung/Qualcomm devices to be blocked from shipping and award damages to those that are covered by it.

Nvidia’s case particularly calls out Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali, or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures for things that violate their patents. Their press release includes in it a more utilitarian list that tells you what products would be impacted.

The identified Samsung products include the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4 mobile phones; and the Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro and Galaxy Tab 2 computer tablets. Most of these devices incorporate Qualcomm mobile processors -- including the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801 and 805. Others are powered by Samsung Exynos mobile chips, which incorporate ARM's Mali and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPU cores.

A Response from Samsung

More recently, Samsung has countersued Nvidia in its attempt to drag this fight into the mud. They have sued Nvidia for six breaches of patents and Velocity Micro for eight breaches of patents of semiconductors and computer innovations. They also allege, and this is particularly ironic given Samsung’s history, that Nvidia has falsely touted its benchmarks in regards to the Shield Tablet by claiming it's Tegra K1 Processor outpaced the Exynos 5433 in the Galaxy Note 4.

Nvidia has said that it is reading and examining the complaints but that it rejects allegations that it in any way misled users regarding the Shield Tablet, saying it ran the benchmark tests with fresh from the box load-outs. This case was filed in Virginia court.

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Don Parsons
| Senior Writer

A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don