SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation today responded to a Monday court filing (Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware) 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.

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"We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. "At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business."

NVIDIA entered into the agreement in 2004 in order to bring platform innovations to Intel CPU based systems. In return, Intel took a license to NVIDIA's rich portfolio of 3D, GPU, and other computing patents.

Since signing the agreement, NVIDIA has offered innovations such as SLI(R), Hybrid power, and CUDA(TM) parallel processing. ION(TM), the most recent innovation, integrates a powerful NVIDIA GPU, north bridge and south bridge into one compact die. When combined with a CPU, ION enables a two-chip PC architecture for Intel processors two years ahead of Intel's own solution. In addition, the ION platform offers 10x the performance of Intel's current three chip design(1).

The industry and consumers now count on innovations from NVIDIA. Microsoft recently endorsed ION because it offers consumers the first truly affordable premium Windows experience. Late last year Apple selected NVIDIA's chipset for its entire new line of notebooks including the MacBook Classic, MacBook Air, MacBook and MacBook Pro. Today, companies like Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, Falcon Northwest, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, NEC, and Toshiba all ship exciting innovations created by NVIDIA as a result of its agreement with Intel.

Huang said that, given the broad and growing adoption of NVIDIA's platform innovations, it is not surprising that Intel is now initiating a dispute over a contract signed four years ago. Innovations like ION, SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA threaten Intel's ability to control the PC platform.

NVIDIA has been attempting to resolve the disagreement with Intel in a fair and reasonable manner for over a year. NVIDIA's chipsets for Intel's current CPU bus interface are not affected by the dispute.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce(R) products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro(R) products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla(TM) products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.

Copyright (C) 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, SLI, CUDA, Ion, GeForce, Tesla and Quadro are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the license with Intel; and the impact and benefits of NVIDIA's products and innovations; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: that a court finds in favor of Intel; development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended October 26, 2008. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our Web site and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

(1) Intel 3D Mark 2006 score = 129, 1280x1024, Intel 945GC, 1 GB DDR2-533, Atom 1.6GHz

NVIDIA 3D Mark 2006 score = 1299, 1280x1024, GeForce 9300, 2 GB DDR2-800, Atom 1.6GHz

Web site: http://www.nvidia.com/