Nvidia cuts Intel off amidst legal wrangling

Nvidia stepped up its legal battle with Intel this week by halting development of its upcoming lines of chipsets for Intel processors.

The company said that the move was made in response to its ongoing feud with Intel over licensing rights for the chipmaker's future processor models.

Intel has contended that the new models contain different technology than was covered in the licensing agreement and thus should not be subject to old deal. Nvidia has challenged the claims and accused Intel of backing out of its licensing agreement.

The two sides reached an agreement on some areas of the dispute with an August agreement. The current spat, however, covers licensing for Intel's DMI infrastructure. Nvidia is arguing that, given the uncertainty over licensing, it cannot continue to invest in development.

The feud between Intel and Nvidia comes amidst what is turning into a major shift in the nature of both the GPU and CPU markets. Major vendors in both markets have been looking to blur the lines between graphic processors and central processors and turn some of the general processing workload over to GPU cores.

For Intel, the shift has come in the form of its upcoming Larrabee on-board graphics platform. The company is hoping that the Larrabee chips can take over for current embedded graphics hardware.

Nvidia meanwhile is looking forward to the release of its Fermi platform, a new line of GPUs which will be designed to help shoulder the load of multi-threaded processing tasks.