NVIDIA responded to a court filing yesterday in which Intel alleged that the four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as Nehalem. The filing does not impact NVIDIA chipsets that are currently being shipped. Intel is trying to delay the inevitable value shift from the CPU to the GPU.

NVIDIA believes that our bus license with Intel clearly enables us to build chipsets for Intel CPUs with integrated memory controllers. We are aggressively developing new products for Intel's current front side bus (MCP79/GeForce 9400 and MCP89) and for Intel's future bus, DMI.

The soul of the PC has become the GPU and the CPU is becoming less relevant. Intel is trying to prevent GPU adoption since the evidence is undeniable that the CPU has run its course. The rapid shift to the smallest and lowest price CPUs like Atom is a clear reflection of this trend.

NVIDIA has delivered significant platform innovations to the market over the last few years such as SLI, Hybrid Power, and CUDA. ION, our most recent platform innovation, has tipped the industry to favoring the GPU. When paired with a low-cost CPU, it is a 2 chip platform offering 10x the performance of Intel's current three chip design using the same low-cost CPU.

This is a clear attempt by Intel to slow the broad adoption of NVIDIA platforms and to protect a decaying CPU business.

NVIDIA issued a press release on this subject this morning, which you can find here: https://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1234956565831.html