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"Intel and Nvidia announced Monday that the two companies have entered into a new cross-licensing agreement. This agreement effectively ends the legal battle the two chipmakers have been engaged in since 2009.\nThe agreement says Intel will pay Nvidia $1.5 billion in licensing fees over the next six years. In exchange, however, Intel will have access to Nvidia's patent library. Likewise, Nvidia will get to license some of Intel's patents.The news, which comes on the heels of CES 2011, where Intel showcased its Sandy Bridge processors, is, as Ars Technica puts it, \"a massively big deal for both companies and for the PC industry as a whole.\"\nThe fact that microprocessor giant Intel and graphics chip maker Nvidia are able to come to this agreement is incredible, especially considering the last 24 months of bad blood between the companies.\nThe original legal dispute between Nvidia and Intel centered on Nvidia's ability to create Intel-compatible chipsets for Intel's Nehalem and Core series CPUs. Nvidia claimed that its 2004 licensing agreement with Intel permitted it to create Nehalem and other Core successor chipsets (much as it had successfully developed chipsets for the Core 2 Duo microprocessors). Intel disagreed and sued Nvidia in February 2009.\nAlthough Nvidia countersued, the company still wound up exiting the chipset business in October 2009. \nThis has been problematic for some hardware companies, including Apple, who have continued to use older Core 2 Duo processors, where Nvidia can still offer its integrated graphics chips in its smaller-laptop products instead of opting for the inferior (until Sandy Bridge, that is) Intel integrated graphics solutions.\nThis new agreement, Nvidia has stressed, does not mean the company will be returning to the Intel-compatible chipset market. Instead, Intel will have access to Nvidia patents for use on its CPUs. This means future Sandy Bridge CPUs could use GPUs that use Nvidia technology.\nLikewise, future Nvidia processors used in its Tegra and other system-on-a-chip setups can utilize some of Intel's patents.\nThe fact that an on-die GPU could now effectively use Nvidia technology is a boon for Nvidia (and Intel, for that matter), but a blow to AMD. AMD is a rival to both Intel and Nvidia \u2014 and it is losing (badly) to both companies. Intel's shift to Core processors in 2006 effectively left AMD in the dust in terms of both power and performance. \nOn Monday evening, AMD announced the resignation of its CEO, Dirk Meyer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/intel-nvidia-settlement/>