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Graphics Patents News Hardware

Samsung Seeking To Block Nvidia Chips From US Market 93

Posted by Soulskill from the making-the-lawyers-rich dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that Samsung has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission asking them to block the import of Nvidia's graphics chips . This is part of Samsung's retaliation for a similar claim filed by Nvidia against Samsung and Qualcomm back in September. Both companies are wielding patents pertaining to the improved operation of graphics chips in cell phones and other mobile devices.
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Samsung Seeking To Block Nvidia Chips From US Market More

Samsung Seeking To Block Nvidia Chips From US Market

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  • I mean this respectfully (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Saturday November 22, 2014 @07:08PM (#48441801)
    Paten trolls into hardware trolls - How about you folks go fuck yourselves.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Perhaps companies with idiots for lawyers shouldn't start attacking Samsung..

      Apple attacked Samsung for using the same elements that Apple stole from others, Samsung attacked back with *real* patents to back themselves up.

      nVidia attacks Samsung with questionable patents and Samsung attacks back with *real* patents.

      Your "go fuck yourselves" should be directed @ Apple and nVidia you beligerent fuck.

      • Reguardless of how "patentable" things like round buttons and beveled edges should be you obviously don't understand how patents work. If Apple tried to sue the people they derived from for patent infringement they would loose and also run the risk of having their patent nullifed. If the people they copied from wanted to nullify the Apple patent or come to Samsungs aide in the case Apple put against them they could have. None of these things happened.

        And while we're on the subject, Samsung has a long histor

        • Wait...you're asking for a boycott on Samsung, but not Apple? ...and you think that Apple hasn't tried (and succeeded) in lawsuits defending their frivolous patents by outspending their competition on fancy lawyers? While I agree that Samsung has pulled a lot of crap that is boycott-worthy, the way you've stated the case is, to put it nicely, disingenuous.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

          is theft from a thief still theft?

          Sharp stole LCD technology from a chemistry professor at Hull University and beat them to the patent office claiming it as their own - AFTER he published papers describing the technology. http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science... [hull.ac.uk]

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Tried to find any evidence on your claims that sharp stole the professors technology Your link only talks about the professor but nothing at all about sharp stealing it. Could not find anything other some of the basic LCD discoveries were licences out to various companies.

          • Hey, let's be frank

            In technology almost everyone is a thief

            Not only in the corporate settings, even in the academia setting thievery thrives --- you do not even need to look far to read stories of professors stealing and patenting students' ideas from himself / herself

            And I am speaking from experience ... I had (at least) one idea stolen by my professor(s) and I couldn't do shit about it --- basically I had the choice of litigation (which would linger for ages) against my professor(s) and the university (wh

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Apple attacked Samsung for using the same elements that Apple stole from others, Samsung attacked back with *real* patents to back themselves up.

        Except both were real patents. Apple's patents were Design Patents [wikipedia.org] which cover ornamental designs unique to the covered item. Samsung's patents were FRAND licensed Utility Patents.

        And yes, if you want people to learn about computers, you gotta learn all about IP law because it's complex and tricky.

        Samsung made a phone that did violate Apple's design patents - which

        • >And yes, if you want people to learn about computers, you gotta learn all about IP law because it's complex and tricky.

          So the girls should be becoming lawyers instead?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Threni ( 635302 )

      Why don't we change the law so that when you have a patent you just get to put a little sticker on the box the devices comes in that says "I did this!" so your shareholders and your mums and dads can be really proud! Well done! And if you can win a law suit against someone else, they have to put a stick on their boxes which say "this box contains stuff some other company worked on" and people can decide whether they give a shit or not, and if they don't (clue: nobody cares), they can buy the product, but

    • Once again patent law helps innovative small companies and the customer!

  • the consumer comes out ahead in all this, amirite?
    • We do? Whatever happens, its going to create needlessly high barriers to entry to potential companies looking to make chips.(the threat of being sued), and the cost of the law suit, as well as funds saved in anticipation on the next law suit adding to the total price of doing business. The only people who come out ahead are the lawyers, and mabey politicians. Thats the problem in America. Its that government and regulation is done for the careers of the lawyers doing the regulating, not for the people it
      • That whooshing sound is my sarcasm flying right over your head. Of course the major loser in these things is the consumers.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      I assume that maybe I would get a cheaper graphics card (Sweden.)

  • Don't these 2 competitors realize by not sueing each other they both win?

    In the end it doesn't matter who wins. the lawyers will take the money and both Nvidia and Samsung loose.

    • Once one has fired a Salvo the other is really obliged to do the same otherwise everyone else will see them as an easy mark. Blame the twat that decided to fire the first salvo and the idiotic patent laws. Samsung appear to be proceeding down the only avenue that the current ridiculous laws allow.

    • The only winning move is not to play.

  • If you complain about no nvidia source take note (Score:3)

    by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Saturday November 22, 2014 @07:51PM (#48441975)
    If you complain about no nvidia source code for linux drivers take note - it's because of this stupid patent troll shit that they get subjected to and had to deal with ever since some of the graphics team were at SGI.

    • that argument only works if Nvidia were the victim here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        The argument works because the software patent system exists instead of it being a copyright system. There should not be any victims or any way it can escalate into the current attempt at a denial of trade.
  • Honestly nVidia's business practices have been so shady recently, they make what Intel was doing in 2006 look tame. They do everything they can to make as many games as possible run poorly on anything other than nVidia GPUs, including sending employees to game studios to help "optimize" their games. They bribe review sites and "suggest" certain benchmarks to use. Also, thier legal department is more aggressive than Apple's. They deserve to be taken down a notch.

    • Re:Deserved (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Calibax ( 151875 ) * on Sunday November 23, 2014 @12:04AM (#48442649)

      How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware? They don't write the games. Both AMD and Nvidia have extensive outreach programs to developers and make engineers available to game studios, and obviously those engineers will make suggestions on how to improve game performance on their hardware. But I doubt that game studio staff would be willing to cripple their games on either platform at the behest of Nvidia or AMD engineers.

      Would you like to provide citations that they bribe sites? And how would that hurt game performance? How can using certain benchmarks (as you suggest) make games run slower on other hardware? And even if they did, are you saying that sites would accept Nvidia's suggestions and ignore AMD suggestions?

      AMD fanboy much?

      • How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware? They don't write the games. Both AMD and Nvidia have extensive outreach programs to developers and make engineers available to game studios

        That is true, but nVidia's outreach engineers have a history of checking code that regresses performance on competitor hardware. See what this Value developer [blogspot.com] has to say about "Vendor A": Vendor A is also jokingly known as the "Graphics Mafia". Be very careful if a dev from Vendor A gets embedded into your team. These guys are serious business.

        How can using certain benchmarks (as you suggest) make games run slower on other hardware?

        Thats not what I'm suggesting. I am suggesting that nVidia has a history of being dishonest which thier performance benchmarks. The worst case by far is during th

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calibax ( 151875 ) *

          That is true, but nVidia's outreach engineers have a history of checking code that regresses performance on competitor hardware. See what this Value developer [blogspot.com] has to say about "Vendor A":
          Vendor A is also jokingly known as the "Graphics Mafia". Be very careful if a dev from Vendor A gets embedded into your team. These guys are serious business.

          So, you are suggesting that game studios let vendors check in code totally unreviewed? I worked at a company that had two engineers from Nvidia and 3 from AMD - none of them had the ability to check in code, although they did have access to our sources.

          The Nvidia engineers were top notch, knew their products, knew how to get performance from their products, and would be unhappy if we didn't take notice of what they said. The AMD people were OK, but just not in the same league as the Nvidia people. Which was best for us? The Nvidia guys improved our product for both their customers and AMD customers. The AMD people would only look at AMD specific code and provided way less assistance. I'd go with the Nvidia guys any day - they were indeed serious, hard working engineers, one with a ph.d., the other with a masters.

          And the best you can suggest for fiddling is a benchmark from 13 years ago? That several lifetimes in graphics technology - go look at any 2001 game. As I recall, both Nvidia and ATI (as it was then) tweaked benchmarks to favor their product around that time and were found out. However, modern graphics benchmarks make it difficult for any manufacturer to corrupt the results.

      • Would you like to provide citations that they bribe sites?

        Nvidias a dirty whore she slept around to trade favourable hardware reviews for sex. We should doxx her. I'll start:

        NVIDIA CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS
        2701 San Tomas Expressway
        Santa Clara, CA 95050
        Tel: 1+ (408) 486-2000
        Fax: 1+ (408) 486-2200
        info@nvidia.com

      • How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware?

        http://hardware-beta.slashdot.... [slashdot.org]

  • Is there any evidence (or even suspicion) that either side here used either the patent filing or actual stolen technology to create their product? If not then the laws are clearly broken when we are allowing non-revolutionary ideas to be patented.

    • Is there any evidence (or even suspicion) that either side here used either the patent filing or actual stolen technology to create their product? If not then the laws are clearly broken when we are allowing non-revolutionary ideas to be patented.

      NVIDIA holds a very large graphics patent pool. In a lot of ways they're the successor to SGI, and in the interim have picked up companies such as 3dfx, which has further enlarged their patent pool. Which makes it very, very hard to efficiently implement a GPU with

  • It sounds like these guys are taking the concept of competition to ever higher extremes. Is this ever going to end? I, for one, am not eager to see corporate armies taking it to the battlefield. But then, maybe I already missed that train ...

  • ...that the patent system is fubar.

  • Okay, police are tracking people on their cell phone. So they should know if you're in a car traveling with someone else. So they should be able to make like "facebook friends" of all the people who travel with you. If someone reports your car's license plate, they probably could just feasibly link that to your phone on a simple 1:1 database search and stop you down the road if you're driving erratically.

    This makes me wonder how the public could contribute... Has anyone thought of, just for getting a
    • I'm not endorsing anyone doing this for real. It is just a thought on the ramifications. If they can catch you more often when you do bad driving, would we stop hanging them high, and put lower fines on driving infractions?

  • Nothing would make me happier.

    From an open source perspective Nvidia is far worse than Samsung with regards to hardware openness.

    I mean, I have been very careful over the years to not buy phones, tablets, video cards that are associated with Nvidia in my private computing and professional computing experience.

    I urge everyone here to do the same and put your dollars privately in those situations professional consulting can sway your customers opinion towards companies that have open hardware. Even companies

  • from getting a GF 960 for Christmas, Samsung is gonna get it.

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