By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Intel has filed a suit in the Court of Chancery in Delaware, alleging that the 2004 cross-licensing agreement the companies signed ”does not extend to Intel’s future generation CPUs with ‘integrated’ memory controllers, such as Nehalem.” NVIDIA, in a press release, begs to differ.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA said:

“We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies. At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.”

There’s clearly a dig at intel in that last sentence there. But NVIDIA didn’t leave it there, nope. They kicked still more sand in Intel’s face in the press release.

Huang said that, given the broad and growing adoption of NVIDIA’s platform innovations, it is not surprising that Intel is now initiating a dispute over a contract signed four years ago. Innovations like ION, SLI, Hybrid power, and CUDA threaten Intel’s ability to control the PC platform.

NVIDIA has been attempting to resolve the disagreement with Intel in a fair and reasonable manner for over a year. NVIDIA’s chipsets for Intel’s current CPU bus interface are not affected by the dispute.

Okaaay. It seems the kid-gloves are off, and all efforts at playing nice are gone as well.

Further details on Intel’s court filing are not currently available.