During today’s Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) earnings call for Q3 with very good numbers, Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang indicated that the company was already actively discussing licensing its GPU technologies in the mobile space to certain partners.

While Huang did not say how many partners they were working with or at what stage they were in the discussions, he did say the following, “Our licensing discussions are very active. And we have many in important stages.”

That statement was a response to an analyst question about the success of Maxwell and if it was bringing any potential progress on the licensing front. Currently, Nvidia is the sole user of its mobile GPUs and mobile GPU IP, however, with the success of Maxwell in desktop, there is a very good chance that some companies would become interested in utilizing it for their SoCs. Afterall, if you look at some of our Maxwell reviews, you can see that Nvidia is getting much more performance out of their GPUs while using the same process (28nm) as the previous generation and simultaneously reducing power. These advancements eventually trickle down to Nvidia’s mobile products as the company’s product roadmaps have indicated in the past.

Currently, the Tegra K1 utilizes Nvidia’s Kepler architecture, which was originally launched in desktop and laptop GPUs back in 2012 and then perfected in 2013 with the GTX Titan. Following the Kepler release in 2012, Nvidia announced the Tegra K1 (formerly known as Tegra 5) with Kepler in the beginning of this year and has been shipping Tegra K1 SoCs since the summer. So, a realistic timeframe to see Maxwell GPU IP in mobile is very likely going to be towards the tail end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016, so that isn’t necessarily going to be as quick as the mobile refresh cycle usually is. However, with each generation of SoC Nvidia has vastly improved the speed of GPU architecture implementation so there’s no knowing exactly how soon we could see an Nvidia GPU in something like a MediaTek.

It will be interesting to see how Nvidia will balance their GPU IP licensing with customers if they are also simultaneously competing with them. After all, ARM and IMG license both CPUs and GPUs, but neither of them actually produce their own products that compete with their licensees. There is also a chance that Nvidia may be trying to muscle weaker companies into licensing their technology because of the strength of their patents, which may be why Nvidia recently sued Samsung and Qualcomm.

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ARM today announced its latest graphics IP which includes three new GPUs as well as new video and display processors. With the introduction of ARM’s new Mali 8 series graphics IP, the company put a bigger focus on power efficiency and is looking to target products across a broad spectrum of capabilities and power envelopes. ARM’s announcement today introduces the Mali-T860, Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 GPUs as well as the Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550.

The new Mali graphics IP, as shown above, is part of ARM’s effort to make their graphics solutions even more efficient than their predecessors. This includes the ARM Mali-T800 series which is a successor to the currently available Mali-T700 series. The first of this graphics IP, the Mali-T800 series is designed to be more for the mid-range of devices as opposed to the high-end, however, ARM did state that the ARM Mali-T860 is still a high performance part.

The Mali-T860 is, according to ARM, a much more efficient GPU than the previous generations stating that it is 45% more efficient at certain tasks than the T628, which was the company’s high performance part before the T700 series cam out. It also has 16 scalable shader cores, meaning that you don’t have to fully implement all cores in the design, but I suspect most that choose to license it will go for the 16 core design.

ARM also claims support for 4K, which very likely means the ability to display 4K pixels and maybe 4K UIs without much more than that. Because realistically, no mobile platform is really capable of 4K gaming right now unless they upscale 1080P content. Additionally, the GPU will support OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2, but no Open CL 2.0. There is also going to be DirectX 11.1 support, but no DirectX 11.3 or 12.0 support. And last but not least, they also will support renderscript compute for all of the Android implementations. The lack of OpenCL 2.0 may be due to the fact that these are designed to be more mainstream or because OpenCL 2.0 is so new, but the lack of DirectX 12 is a bit interesting since this GPU will be in products sometime next year, which is around the time of Windows 10 (and DX12) launch.

That brings us to the Mali-T830 and T820 which are ARM Mali’s even more power efficient GPUs designed for the mainstream performance. These GPUs essentially carry many of the same capabilities of the T860 but with only four shader cores and no 4K support. They also lack an advanced tiling unit, which the T860 has. With these ARM Mali graphic chips, the company claims 50% better areal efficiency and 55% faster performance over the T622 generation of ARM Mali graphics, which preceded the current T720 generation of Mali GPUs.

Last but not least, are ARM’s Mali Video and Display processors which are designed to bring ARM’s goal of efficiency all the way from the GPU to the display processor. The way that they achieve this is with their new Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550 processors each designed for high efficiency operation in conjunction with the ARM Mali 800 series GPUs.  As you can see from the slides below, the Mali-V550 also brings HEVC (h.265) encode and decode capability to ARM’s video processors and brings the ability to support multiple standards. The V550 also scales from doing 1080 at 60 FPS with a single video care to 4K at 120 FPS with 8 video cores and it supports multiple simultaneous encode and decode streams.

The Mali-DP550 further enables a lot of what the T860 and V550 can do with improved power and memory efficiency as well as the ability to scale to 4K resolution. ARM is clearly ready to hop aboard the 4K bandwagon, with Qualcomm leading the charge. They also support 3rd party display differentiation which allows for 3rd party/SoC vendor IP into the Mali display pipeline.

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In the company’s continued efforts of not agreeing to settle with any patent trolls, Newegg has once again defeated a patent troll in partnership with GEICO to fight off BS patents and patent claims. In a blog post titled, Patent Trolls, They Fold Like a Cheap Suit When Faced With Trial, Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer,Lee Cheng talked about the company’s latest run in with a patent troll from the mecca of patent trolls, East Texas. The litigant, Macrosolve, started this series of litigation in 2011 with a filing of more than 75 lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas against companies from all different types of industries. They claimed that these companies were distributing electronic forms over the internet or to mobile devices and then collection reviews and the responses would be liable for patent infringement. And as Newegg’s Lee Cheng states, with such a broad definition, virtually no company is safe from such a ridiculous patent.

Because Macrosolve is a patent troll, their plan was to sue a dozen or two companies at a time and offer them to settle. These settlements netted Macrosolve more than $4 million in settlements, while Newegg and GEICO held out and fought back. This is primarily because most companies’ lawyer fees if they were to go to court would be greater than if they were able to agree to a settlement. This mentality and legal climate is what enables these patent trolls to continue to exist and extort companies of all sizes. However, many of these patent trolls go after companies that they believe will settle rather than take them to court.

Lee Cheng also stated, “In a sense, we are disappointed because we were robbed of an opportunity to prove in court that Macrosolve was and is nothing more than a serial, shameless abuser of patent rights, with a poor-quality patent that has not even survived its first reexamination. Macrosolve failed to create products and services that real customers found valuable, whose principals decided to turn it into a corporate parasite. It is not a coincidence that faced with its first real opposition in Newegg and Geico, Macrosolve folded like a cheap suit, and dismissed its lawsuits against all defendants.” He continued, “I could never figure out how Macrosolve would not be required to publicly and timely disclose the fact that its primary asset, the ‘816 Patent,’ was the subject of a final rejection in reexamination or that it dismissed almost all pending lawsuits with prejudice. What was most bizarre was how Macrosolve’s stock price traded up the day that the USPTO issued the final rejection of the ‘816 Patent’. Curious. Definitely worth someone’s attention.”

So, even though the court dismissed all of Macrosolve’s claims against Newegg, Newegg still itends to seek all of its fees and costs against Macrosolve for abusive litigation tactics. However, because of the way of how these patent trolls are created and maintained, even if Newegg were to win these claims of fees and costs against the patent troll they would simply file for bankruptcy after paying out the $4m they’ve paid out to their principals and lawyers. The real truth is that nobody is being held accountable for these patent trolls litigation and that no individual is being held accountable for their actions. We need patent reform for a lot of reasons in America and this is clearly one of them. Hopefully this will ruin Macrosolve’s patent claims in future litigation so that others can simply point to Newegg’s dismissal and not waste legal resources and money on court.

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