Nvidia's licensing situation with AMD is just as bad as with Intel

During yesterday's unveiling of its accelerated roadmap for 12- and even 16-core processors, an AMD executive said he did not believe the licensing situation between his company and Nvidia would enable Nvidia to produce chipsets that support future AMD platforms. Specifically, it appears Nvidia is not yet licensed to produce motherboard chipsets that support AMD's next-generation processors, reducing the likelihood for multi-GPU SLI support for AMD's "Istanbul" and future generations.

"For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time," stated server business unit vice president Pat Patla. "We don't expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010."

Anyone spreading the rumor that Nvidia is looking to invest in Via Technologies may be thinking Nvidia could use a friend -- any friend -- about now. Its ability to produce chipsets for Intel's Nehalem platform remains on hold, perhaps permanently now that it has countersued Intel over its rights to say it supports Nehalem in interviews to the press. Perhaps Patla's statement that Nvidia will "support existing platforms" can be interpreted as the closest thing to an olive branch it's going to get, especially from the CPU maker that now owns its principal competitor.