Intel and nVidia shake hands with $1.5B deal

nVidia and Intel have announced a six year cross licensing deal worth $1.5BN which resolves a long term patent dispute between the two companies. This could mean a potential integration of Nvidia GPUs with Intel's processors.

The agreement announced earlier this week means that Intel will pay Nvidia $1.5 billion over the next six years in exchange for access to nVidia's patent portfolio, including technology related to GPUs and supercomputers. Nvidia will also get access to Intel's patent portfolio covering microprocessors and chipsets although the deal does exclude flash memory and Intel x86 designs.

“The cross-licensing agreement allows Intel to integrate NVIDIA technologies and those that are covered by our patents into their CPUs, such as Sandy Bridge, for example,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. “And a cross-license allows us to build processors and take advantage of Intel patents for the types of processor we're building—Project Denver, Tegra, and the types of processors we're going to build in the future.”

Analysts have said that Intel could use this licensing agreement to produce a Sandy Bridge successor with an on die GPU which could be based on nVidia technology.

Huang has said that Nvidia have no plans to produce Intel compatible chipsets, regardless of the settlement. They are going to focus on ARM processors, such as the TEGRA system on a chip design for mobile devices.

KitGuru says: They walk off hand in hand into the sunset, but we wonder how the benefits of this partnership will come to fruitition in the coming years.

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