Corporations of these days are engaged in battles for market share and profits. The battlefield is the global market, and the weapons they use are patents, lawsuits and petitions. Nvidia and Samsung are engaged in such a war as we speak – the two companies are involved in an exchange of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits on patent infringements. The latest battle of the war was initiated by the South Korean manufacturer – it has petitioned the United States International Trade Commission to block the sale of Nvidia’s chips – graphic processors – in the country, PC World reports.
The two companies have started the latest round of their war in September, when Nividia sued both Samsung Corporation and Qualcomm for the alleged infringement of several of its patents related to graphics processors. The manufacturer also requested that the International Trade Commission block the sale of Samsung Galaxy handsets containing certain Qualcomm, ARM and Imagination Technologies chips. Samsung responded with a patent infringement lawsuit of its own, claiming that Nvidia has infringed six of its patents related to chip design and other technologies.
According to the ITC, the request filed by Samsung would extend to both Nvidia’s graphics cards and systems on a chip, blocking the sale of both the Nvidia Geforce product line and the Tegra mobile processors. Such a ban would affect all the tech industry, affecting companies that use Nvidia platforms in their products – one of the best known examples would be Google’s Nexus 9 tablet computer, built around the Nvidia Tegra chip.
“We have not seen the complaint so can’t comment, but we look forward to pursuing our earlier filed ITC action against Samsung products”, Hector Marinez, spokesperson for Nvidia told Bloomberg in an email statement. Nvidia considers Samsung’s move to be a “predictable tactic”, and intends to make the same move against Samsung with the ITC. The war has just started – who knows when it would end?