Intel running scared, says NVIDIA

The war of chipset words between Intel and NVIDIA continues to simmer.

NVIDIA has hit back at Intel's legal attempt to scrap its chipset licence, claiming it is all about trying to protect Chipzilla's flagging CPU sales.

Intel claims that the four-year-old chipset licence agreement the pair signed does not cover CPUs with integrated memory controllers, such as Nehalem. It has taken Nvidia to court to settle the matter.

Nvidia head honcho, Jen-Hsun Huang, was confident that the licence applies to the likes of Nehalem.

He said the case is nothing to do with the licences but was all about Intel being terrified that Nvidia was going to nick Intel's business.

Huang said that Intel's CPU days had run their course and the "soul of the PC" is shifting to the GPU.

Quite what makes up the soul of a computer is probably about the same as guessing how many angels can fit onto a silicon chip, however it is Huang's theory and probably gets great comfort from it.

Huang thinks that since Nvidia is getting so popular Intel needs to initiate a dispute over a contract signed four years ago because Ion, SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA threaten Intel's ability to control the PC platform.

"They're attempting to prevent us from operating," an NV spinner told the INQ. "They want the entire platform, they don't want anyone else to innovate."

Nvidia's chipsets for Intel's current CPU bus interface are not affected by the dispute.