In a blog, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stated that it has filed patent infringement complaints with the US District Court in Delaware (where most US companies are incorporated) as well as with the International Trade Comission regarding Samsung (KRX:005935) and Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) infringement of its patents (You can view the complaints here (ITC) and here (Delaware)) .

Nvidia is alleging that Samsung’s devices that use Qualcomm’s chips are infringing upon Nvidia’s own technologies that have been patented. Not just that, but by filing a complaint with the ITC, Nvidia is seeking that such devices that infringe upon these patents be banned from importation and sale within the United States.

The devices that Nvidia claims infringe upon their patents include the Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy S4 as well as the Galaxy Tab S and Galaxy Note Pro. Nvidia claims seven different patents were violated by Samsung’s Exynos processors as well as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. The Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that are claimed to infringe upon these patents include the Snapdragon S4 (using the Adreno 225), Snapdragon 400 (using the Adreno 305), Snapdragon 600 (using the Adreno 320), Snapdragon 800 and 801 (using the Adreno 330), and Snapdragon 805 (using the Adreno 420).

A careful reading Nvidia’s patent infringement complaint shows that Nvidia has made a clear decision here to go after Samsung and Qualcomm. Obviously, this hurts Nvidia’s chances of ever landing a design win inside of Samsung, but by going after Samsung and Qualcomm, the company goes after the biggest seller of Android smartphones and the biggest seller of Android smartphone SoCs. Additionally, the complaint states that Nvidia is claiming that Samsung infringes on their GPU patents by saying Samsung uses Mali and PowerVR graphics, which aren’t actually theirs but rather graphics they license from ARM and Imagination technologies, however Nvidia has chosen not to include them in the suit.

Qualcomm and Samsung are not GPU pioneers or innovators in graphics technology. Qualcomm dominates the global market for smartphone applications processors, with a market share exceeding 50%, and is also a leader in tablet application processors. Samsung leads the global market in sales of smartphones, selling about twice as many as its nearest competitor, and is also a global leader in the sales of tablet computers, nearly tripling its market share over the past two years. Many of Samsung’s smartphones and tablet computers are powered by mobile processors supplied by Qualcomm, which use GPUs commercially known as
“Adreno.” Other smartphones and tablets sold by Samsung use GPUs commercially known as “Mali” or “PowerVR.” All of these products infringe the Asserted Patents. The market success of Qualcomm and Samsung in these areas is built on the back of NVIDIA’s pioneering graphics technology, and Qualcomm and Samsung continue to release new products using NVIDIA’s technology.

The patents in question,  6,198,488, 6,992,667,  7,038,685, 7,015,913, 6,697,063, 7,209,140 and 6,690,372 all pertain in one way or another to graphics patents and it appears quite clear that Nvidia is attacking the two biggest players in Tegra’s own mobile SoC space.

The claims Nvidia makes are all utility patents and they go into deep technical detail about certain graphics processes that Nvidia believes Qualcomm and Samsung are infringing upon. The reality of the situation is that Nvidia could theoretically sue Apple, Imagination Technologies, ARM and virtually any smartphone or SoC manufacturer in the world for patent infringement based upon these claims. But Nvidia is choosing not to instead going after Samsung and Qualcomm, and really it seems like Samsung is just collateral damage here, but it could also be that Nvidia wants to weaken Samsung in order to make room for other vendors that might use their chips like Tegra K1. It could also be that Nvidia may just want to generate IP licensing revenue from all of Samsung’s billions of dollars in sales of Galaxy devices and that could be good enough for them. Until we get some comment from Qualcomm and this thing actually goes to court, we probably won’t know the outcome of this suit. Once again, the tech industry continues to sue one another for patent infringement.

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Imagination Technologies (LON: IMG), the company now in ownership of MIPS’ technologies, has announced a new 64-bit MIPS processor that goes by the name of the MIPS I6400.

The MIPS I6400 is Imagination Technologies’ and MIPS first 64-bit processor and actually one of the few 64-bit processors out there capable of running on a mobile device and run Android. This MIPS I6400 chip joins the MIPS Warrior family of processors which includes the Warrior M-class of entry-level MIPS cores for embedded and microcontroller applications and the Warrior P-class of high-performance MIPS processors. Based upon how Imagination Technologies is placing this new I-class of processors, it appears as though this will sit in the middle ground between the M-class and P-class of MIPS processors.

MIPS I6400 CPU block diagram

Imagination touts the MIPS I6400 as a scalable, highly efficient 64-bit processor that that can be implemented across a very wide range of performance and power limitations and is capable of high frequencies in more aggressive implementations.

Imagination also has hardware multi-threading which they believe results in higher utilization and CPU efficiency. The company states that its simultaneous multi-threaded (SMT) technology will allow for execution of multiple instructions from multiple threads for every clock cycle. The chips also support hardware virtualization, much like the rest of the MIPS Warrior family but the implementation in the MIPS I6400 allows for up to 15 secure/non-secure guests. Imagination is also quick to tout the high security capabilities of the MIPS I6400 as well as the advanced power management which allows for dedicated clock and voltage levels to each core, only waking cores when they’re needed. This chip also supports 128-bit SIMD based upon MIPS’ SIMD which is designed to support a wide variety of 32 and 64-bit integer and floating point data. This is designed to deliver high performance and high throughput for tasks that can properly utilize the efficiency of SIMD execution in data-parallel applications.

MIPS I6400 Benchmark Performance

In the company’s blog about this new MIPS I6400 processor, the company makes some claims regarding 64-bit performance when compared against their competitor (ARM) and the Cortex-A53 64-bit processor. These include a 50% higher CoreMark and 30% higher DMIPS performance, which need to be independently verified. It would also be very interesting to see how these new processors stack up against ARM and Intel mobile chips in JavaScript performance (Sunspider, etc.) but Imagination Technologies has said that they will not release any benchmarks at this time.

Let’s remember, as of right now MIPS is currently natively supported within Android and will be capable of supporting 64-bit Android as well. While this is great for MIPS, it hasn’t necessarily translated into marketshare against ARM in mobile as the company has very few mobile MIPS licensees for the most current family of products. THe company does claim that they already have a multiple licensees across multiple markets but can’t name any names quite yet.

Does Imagination have what it takes?

Imagination Technologies has a lot of uphill work to do with MIPS and this is a clear indication that Imagination Technologies is not letting off the gas pedal with MIPS.

It clearly wants to be competitive with ARM and Intel, and there’s a good chance that it could nab some SoC licensees from current ARM licensees if its 64-bit CPUs are genuinely better than what ARM is currently offering. However, until its claims are substantiated, it will be very hard to really see them as a real competitor to ARM. Right now, most of MIPS consumer-facing processors are in Ingenic’s SoCs while ARM has tons of licensees. MIPS does have other licensees for other platforms including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Cavium and many others in embedded and networking applications. If it can convince some of their embedded customers to look at their MIPS I6400 series processors, they could seriously become a threat to ARM and give them more competition than Intel has managed to do. In fact, they may help ARM licensees gain more favorable licensing terms if they have room to negotiate thanks to the MIPS I6400 (if it really performs as well as they say it does).

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Oracle used the Imagination Summit 2014 in Santa Clara, California to announce their affiliation with Imagination Technologies of the UK. The collaboration is aimed at enhancing Java for embedded applications, including those used for the Internet of Things (IoT) and to optimize Java for the MIPS CPU architecture.

Oracle shared their vision of the Internet of Things at the Imagination Summit 2014

The MIPS32 and MIPS64 systems will gain support through Oracle’s Java Development Kit (JDK) for developing, debugging, and monitoring Java applications. Developers can use Java in various applications including routers, wireless access points, residential gateways, networking equipment, and mobile devices. Krishna Yarlagadda, President of Imagination in North America, indicated that his company is extremely committed to growing the MIPS ecosystem.

Henrik Stahl, Oracle’s VP of Product Management for Java & Internet of Things, appeared on stage at the Imagination Summit 2014

Imagination’s BusBridge 2 Module features an easily configurable, high-performance, low latency MIPS core interface. It is designed for semiconductor manufacturing companies, ASIC developers, and system OEMs who want to quickly integrate a MIPS core into an AHB-based system. AHB is a bus protocol introduced in Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture version 2 from ARM.

Imagination’s BusBridge 3 family of synthesizable functional blocks help SoC designers integrate MIPS32 CPU’s into the most popular high performance chip bus hierarchies. The OCP2AXI bridge works to connect the MIPS32 OCP{Open Core Protocol) interface to an AXI system bus while the OCP Splitter, a small, synthesizable function block has an OCP input that expands to two OCP outputs. Downloads and User Guides are available on line. Imagination also provides a MIPS Developer Forum.

Additionally a joint effort between Oracle and Imagination will be aimed at improving Java on systems involving Imagination’s PowerVR graphics, a product for multimedia processing, including 2D and 3D graphics. The PowerVR architecture is based on Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), in contrast to Immediate Mode Rendering (IMR) used by most graphics engines in the PC and games console worlds.

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This specification covers all GPGPU-capable hardware, regardless of that hardware being in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks or handhelds – if your GPU is able to compute, the manufacturer only needs to adopt OpenCL support in the driver and that’s that.

That should not be an issue, with AMD/ATI and Nvidia strongly standing behind the standard. Computing engineers on both sides bickered about Brooke+, CAL or CUDA in the past, but both makers are firmly behind OpenCL as the way for the future.

So far, companies that developed and ratified this initial spec include 3Dlabs, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, BARCO, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

You can learn more at the official page of OpenCL API, but I wasn’t able to check the site as it was hammered down with numerous requests (this story was written at 10:05AM CET).

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