In a move that signals the recent Sandy Bridge announcements are more than just fluff, Intel and NVidia have signed a new licensing agreement for the next 6 years to the tune of $1.5Billion USD and the end of all current legal disputes.
Under the new agreement, Intel will have continued access to NVIDIA’s full range of patents. In return, NVIDIA will receive an aggregate of $1.5 billion in licensing fees, to be paid in annual installments, and retain use of Intel’s patents, consistent with its existing six-year agreement with Intel. This excludes Intel’s proprietary processors, flash memory and certain chipsets for the Intel platform.
This is the first step towards an Intel+NVidia solution to rival the AMD Fusion, although it will be interesting to see what this does for NVidia’s ARM plans.
via NVIDIA Newsroom.
NVIDIA does not get access to DMI/QPI in this agreement, and so cannot make Nehalem or Sandy Bridge chipsets. That is ok, since there is little left to do, except to make a South Bridge that supports USB 3.0.
NVIDIA does not get access to x86 either.
NVIDIA does get $300 Million in 2011, 2012, and 2013, followed by $200 Million in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Since NVIDIA has never lost that much money per year in the past, that just about guarantees their profitability for the next 6 years.
Fusion is great for the low end of the market, it will kill Atom in a lot of ways, but it’s not like Intel’s making a lot of money with Atom. Fusion would be a monster in HPC, if not for the fact that it lacks double precision capability.
Without DP, Fusion is just a poor man’s Sandy Bridge, certainly a next gen Intel CPU+any Nvidia GPU would decimate the supercomputing charts.