Rambus has sued Nvidia, claiming that they infringe on 17 different patents.
Hey, any of you remember Rambus? That company that wanted to force RDRAM onto the market and basically sued everyone until it flamed out into oblivion in the early 2000s? Yeah, it’s still around, has a massively stupid slogan, and it’s suing NVIDIA for — what else? — patent infringment, claiming that NVIDIA products with SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 memory controllers violate some 17 different patents. Rambus says it’s tried for six years to negotiate licensing terms with capital-N, but that it has “no other recourse than litigation” to get things sorted out. Valid or not, that’s not good news for NVIDIA, whose stock price is struggling due to market pricing pressure and the news that perhaps all its 8400M and 8600M chips are faulty and will require repair or replacement at the cost of at least $250M
I’ve been happy to see how much adversity Nvidia has seen lately. I really hope each of these incidents helps ATI get ahead.