Samsung requesting ITC to ban the sale of Nvidia chips, including Tegra

For those keeping a tally in the ongoing patent wars, two of the newest contenders are Samsung and Nvidia. Two months ago, Nvidia filed a lawsuit against Samsung, which resulted in a Samsung countersuit a week ago. Samsung has now decided to turn it up a notch, and has now requested the US government to block sales of Nvidia processors and mobile Tegra chipsets in the United States.

The entire hooplah started when Nvidia surprisingly decided to sue Samsung over their chipsets, which came with a request to block several popular Samsung devices (some of which include the Galaxy Note 4, the Note Edge, the S5, and the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2). Nvidia accused Samsung of infringing on 7 GPU-related patents, which dealt with programmable shading, unified shaders, and multithread parallel processing among other things.

Samsung then threw back a countersuit, stating that Nvidia had violated 6 of their patents, which was an action that Nvidia stated was fully predictable and expected by Samsung.

Samsung has now requested that the US government block the sale of Nvidia chipsets and mobile Tegra processors in the US, but has not specifically mentioned exactly which parts are in question. The dispute does mention specific device makers like Biostar and Evga that, if the request was granted, would keep them from selling products in the United States as well. The move would also have implications for other devices as well, like the Tegra 3 powered Ouya console.

According to Bloomberg, Nvidia still hasn’t had a hard look at the dispute, but are reportedly looking forward to bringing their own ITC dispute to the table. While this may seem like just another patent dispute, keep in mind that ITC disputes normally don’t take nearly as long to handle as lawsuits, which could mean serious implications relatively soon should Samsung be granted their request.