Summary: Samsung countersues Nvidia over alleged patent violations and false advertising.
After Nvidia sued Qualcomm and Samsung a couple months back for infringements of their patented GPU technology, they expected to be sued back. And on this, they were right, Samsung has sued them in turn for infringing on six patents, and further, for advertising claims “false and misleading,” when Nvidia boasted of having “the world’s fastest mobile processor,” a claim that is untrue, Samsung alleges, since its own Exynos 5433 processor outperforms Nvidia’s Tegra K1 in benchmark studies.
What Nvidia did not anticipate was for Korean based Samsung to sue a small company Nvidia works with, Velocity, also for a series of alleged patent violations.
“It’s unfortunate that Samsung sued Velocity,” a spokesperson from Nvidia said. “This isn’t Velocity’s fight. But Samsung is just trying to keep its lawsuit in Virginia, which has a faster time to trial than most jurisdictions in the United States. It can be a dangerous strategy for one of the largest companies on the planet to decide to sue one of the smallest companies in all of Virginia.”
Meanwhile, it seems the quibble about who really has the fastest processor could be difficult to decide, since both are citing benchmarking studies. Nvidia at least has seen increasing sales for the chip over the year. Samsung has already been found to have inflated benchmark scores, so their tactic in accusing other companies of the same may simply be a matter of saving face.