Carmack Finds Nvidia's Patent Lawsuit “Disturbing” - Criticizes It On Twitter

The 44 year onetime CTO of Oculus described Nvidia's on-going patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung and Qualcomm equally "agonizing" in a recent tweet.
For those of you who don't recognize this name. John Carmack is the acting Chief Engineering science Officeholder at Oculus. He's the co-founder of id Software. A studio that propelled PC gaming and divers the kickoff person shooter genre with hallmark titles such as Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D the beginning ever first person shooter game.

Carmack is a huge Virtual Reality advocate and an outspoken proponent of Nvidia technologies. He starred Nvidia's G-Sync launch upshot and took the stage with Nvidia'due south CEO Jen-Hsun Huang to promote the technology when it debuted. Carmack publicly acknowledges his close relationship with Nvidia and has rarely worked to hibernate his fondness for the visitor. So it came every bit a surprise to some when he took his criticisms of the company's on-going patent litigation to Twitter. Going as far as to say that he'southward disturbed by Nvidia's attempts to rally public stance behind its legal activeness against Samsung and Qualcomm over patent Infringement claims.

It disturbs me that Nvidia reports on their patent litigation as if nosotros are supposed to be auspicious for them. https://t.co/hVoeF49bYv

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April xvi, 2022

Carmack's Not A Big Fan Of Nvidia's Patent Infringement Lawsuit

Carmack's "disturbance" isn't hard to justify either once the claims which form the basis of this legal battle are carefully examined.

In the visitor'south official argument regarding the patents in question which the company alleges accept been infringed upon by Samsung and Qualcomm,  Nvidia states the following :

Seven infringed patents

Our 7,000 issued and pending patents include inventions vital to modern calculating. We have chosen seven of those patents to assert in these cases.

Those patents include our foundational invention, the GPU, which puts onto a single chip all the functions necessary to process graphics and light up screens; our invention of programmable shading, which allows non-experts to plan sophisticated graphics; our invention of unified shaders, which allow every processing unit in the GPU to be used for different purposes; and our invention of multithreaded parallel processing in GPUs, which enables processing to occur concurrently on separate threads while accessing the same memory and other resources.

Let'southward briefly look at the first patent that Nvidia claims has been infringed upon, the GPU, which is short for graphics processing unit. That is any chip that can process graphics and display images on the screen according to Nvidia's clarification. What the astute among y'all volition discover here is that this clarification fits every possible graphics chip sold today in any device whether exist it a phone a tablet a game panel or a PC. If Samsung or Qualcomm are actively infringing on this patent then so is every single other graphics flake maker. Including ARM, AMD and Intel.

And what can benarrated as "agonizing" in this is that GPUs every bit described by Nvidia to a higher place have actually existed earlier the company was actually founded in the early nineties. You will notice similar bug with all the other mentioned technologies. Programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing as described past Nvidia are all recognized industry broad definitions for established graphics standards, not proprietary technologies.  Now the method by which Nvidia achieves this functionality is proprietary and that's what'southward actually patentable just not the functionality itself.

Unified shaders for example is a hardware feature which allows a shader unit i.eastward. a GPU core to process all types of shaders e.g. pixel shaders, vertex shaders etc.  And information technology was ATi, now AMD'south graphics division, that actually brought this technology to marketplace with the Xenos XBOX 360 GPU. ATi was also the first to be granted a unified shaders patent in 2005, a year prior to Nvidia's patent referenced in the official complaint filing. Only once again it's the method past which this functionality is achieved that's proprietary not the concept itself. Interestingly enough Nvidia was actually the 1 to show reluctance to moving forrard from fixed functions to unified shaders as their rival did. There was a big debate at the time about which approach made the most sense and unified shaders ended upwardly the winner.

After careful examination of some of the "disturbing" facts 1 would arrive at a realization and a question that tin can only be answered past reading between the lines. What exactly is going on hither ?
Carmack seems to share the same general view that'southward being expressed beyond industry. Nvidia has been struggling for some fourth dimension to establish a strong position in the hyper-competitive mobile market with its Tegra line of chips. A market that Samsung and Qualcomm are leading. This legal battle is viewed in the industry as a vehicle for Nvidia to undermine its aforementioned mobile competitors and establish a foothold in the mobile market. Something that Carmack was quick to signal out.

@PixelEuphoria I desire Nvidia to win the mobile market past virtue of engineers, not lawyers. Concur regarding Velocity Micro - WTF did they practise?

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 17, 2022

Apple had created a precedent in patent legal battles that unfortunately is not likely to go away whatsoever fourth dimension before long. This is evident by this very Nvidia arrange every bit it's being pursued in the aforementioned The states district court of the state of Delaware. When all is said and done it's rather frustrating to see companies pouring money into litigation within a flawed justice system.

Source: https://wccftech.com/carmack-nvidias-patent-lawsuit-disturbing/

Posted by: toddrievens.blogspot.com

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