Chief executive officer of Nvidia has made a yet another controversial claim regarding Intel Corp. and the legal battle between the two companies. The head of Nvidia is completely sure not only in the positive outcome of the dispute for Nvidia, but also says that Intel is scared of the graphics company.

“Let me ask you – when was the last time you saw a company as big as Intel sue another smaller company? They are scared and you can write this down: We will kick their ass when we go to court next year,” said Jen-Hsun Huang in an interview with T-Break web-site.

It is interesting to note that Intel itself does not call the legal dispute with Nvidia as a legal action. The world’s largest maker of chips said it had asked the court to determine whether cross-licensing agreement between Intel and Nvidia allows the latter to make and sell chipsets compatible with Intel processors that feature built-in memory controllers. Nvidia believes that it has appropriate rights, whereas Intel claims it does not.

For Nvidia, chipsets represent one third of quarterly revenue, hence, is an important chunk of the business. But chipsets hardly make Intel worry about Nvidia: at the end, it controls its own platform and has serious experience in its own chipsets; what is important is that both Nvidia and ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, are finding new business in supercomputers with their traditional graphics processing units (GPUs). Another important thing is that Intel is working hard to release its own Larrabee GPU.

Both graphics chip designers have signed contracts to supply their processors for supercomputers, which means direct harm of revenue for companies like Intel. The latter still needs to roll out its Larrabee chip and make it successful enough both on supercomputers as well as on consumer markets. No surprise, Intel is worried about both GPUs in general and Nvidia in particular.

Still, this does not mean that Intel is intentionally trying to destroy third-party chipset market to make Nvidia weaker. The latest trends are towards highly-integrated processors that include graphics cores, PCI Express controllers, memory controllers and other important logic. As a result, there is not a lot of space for Nvidia on the chipset market in general going forward…

Tags: Nvidia, Nforce, Geforce, Intel, Atom, Business