Frightened of Atom?
We have asked both Intel and NVIDIA if they can provide copies of either the original agreement or Intel's court filing but have received nothing yet.
Desai believes that Intel is frightened by how popular systems based on its own Atom CPUs - which are among Intel's cheapest processors - have become, and thinks that the improved graphics provided by NVIDIA's ION platform will mean the majority of consumers will have no reason to buy PCs using any of Intel's more expensive CPUs.
"That's what they're bound to say" you may rightly be thinking, but you can see why this might worry Intel. Having got itself back into a position of clear CPU performance leadership over AMD, the £200 netbook suddenly becomes the new PC of choice and the global economy goes down the toilet.
Suddenly people are expecting to spend less on an entire system than Intel would like them to spend just on its CPUs and the genie Intel let out of the bottle with Atom is getting out of control.