Nvidia pleased with ITC pre-trial ruling
Nvidia initiated a lawsuit against Samsung and Qualcomm in September last year. The legal action had Nvidia accusing these rival chip designers of infringing several patents related to GPU technologies in their SoC designs. It was a notable development as Nvidia hasn't got any history of patent lawsuits and the targeted companies are so huge.
In its original filing at the US District Court in Delaware Nvidia said "Instead of developing its own graphics processing technology, Samsung purchases and uses Qualcomm’s infringing processors and GPUs, as well as other processors and GPUs that infringe the claims of the asserted patents." It wants that court, and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), to block products containing Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali or Imagination's PowerVR graphic chips until licensing fees are agreed and paid.
In an update published yesterday on the Nvidia Blog David M. Shannon, executive vice president, chief administrative officer and secretary of Nvidia, wrote about being pleased by progress so far. Shannon summarised that "The judge presiding over our patent case against Samsung and Qualcomm in the U.S. International Trade Commission has returned a pretrial claim construction ruling that favours NVIDIA’s preferred construction on nearly all of the claims that were disputed."
Six out of seven disputed claims will use Nvidia's preferred claim construction when the case starts trial in late June.
Samsung forecasts a quarterly operating profit of about $5.44bn
Samsung has some positive results coming up in its Q1 results. It has forecast a quarterly operating profit of about 5.9 trillion won ($5.44bn). This is much better than the average analyst expectation of 5.3 trillion won. However compared to a year ago Samsung is still bringing in 30 per cent less profit.
To push ahead with its hoped turnaround Samsung has decided to put design above function, reports the WSJ. Apparently Samsung became lazy and the result was the Galaxy S5. Its daring new Galaxy S6 Edge might become a better seller than the regular Galaxy S6, barring any production speed bumps.
