All bets are off as Nvidia goes after Samsung and Qualcomm with at least seven patent infringement lawsuits.

Nvidia announced that it has filed the first two suits against its largest potential customer and its biggest competitor in mobile, alleging that the two companies are infringing Nvidia graphic processing unit (GPU) patents on programmable and unified shading as well as multi-threaded parallel processing.

Nvidia listed the patents involved in its complaint that was filed at the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court in Delaware. Included in the case are patents No. 6,198,488 (transform, lighting and rasterisation system embodied on a single semiconductor platform), No. 6,992,667 (single semiconductor graphics platform system and method with skinning, swizzling and masking capabilities), No. 7,209,140 (system, method and article of manufacture for a programmable vertex processing model with instruction set) and No. 6,690,372 (system, method and article of manufacturer for shadow mapping).

Rounding up the patents included in the complaints are No. 7,038,685 (programmable graphics processor for multi-threaded execution of programs), No. 7,015,913 (method and apparatus for multi-threaded processing of data in a programmable graphics processor) and No. 6,697,063 (rendering pipeline).

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told financial analysts that the company has some 7,000 granted or pending patents, but they only chose the seven that represent the "patents we have high confidence read on their products."

Samsung products included in the suits are the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy S4 mobile phones, Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro, and Galaxy Tab 2 tablets. Most of the devices use Qualcomm mobile processors, including the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801, and 805. Others are powered by Samsung Exynos mobile chips, which use ARM's Mali and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPU cores. ARM and Imagination were not named in the suits.

Nvidia did not specify in the suits the amount of damages it is seeking. For his part, Huang only described the talks the company had with Samsung on the issue of licensing fees.

"We've been in discussions with [Samsung] a couple years because given [their systems] include all three GPU architectures available outside ourselves," Huang said during the conference call. "We made no progress, and they put no real offer on the table. We spent a lot of time with them and made every effort to have a negotiated outcome. When you have been using technology for free for a while it's hard to sign a large, significant licensing agreement."

Samsung and Qualcomm have yet to comment on the lawsuits.

"The suits come at a time when Nvidia is making small strides to revive a mobile business that has been under pressure. Nvidia's Tegra line has rebounded from the bottom and is growing, but this suit seems to have little to due with Tegra, other than Samsung is not using Tegra processors in any product," said Kevin Krewell, principal with market watcher Tirias Research.

An Nvidia representative said it expects the ITC to determine within 30 days whether to open an investigation. If it does a trial could come in mid-2015 with a decision following within a few months. The Delware court will set a date within 90 days for a trial that may not begin for two or three years, she said.

Patent infringement trials are uncertain affairs as mobile leaders Samsung and Apple have already learned.

Apple filed two patent infringement cases against Samsung that led to high-profile jury trials in Silicon Valley. In initial judgements in 2012, it won about a third of the $2.71 billion it sought in the first case, but it won little more than 5% of the $2.191 it sought in a 2014 case.

By: DocMemory
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