NVIDIA-Intel licensing was not really a licensing fee

Just over a year ago, the license agreement between NVIDIA and Intel expired. At the time, there was a lot of speculation in the tech press and financial communities, as lots of folks believed Intel needed a new license to avoid legal trouble. Some believed Intel would strike a licensing deal with AMD, but that never happened.

FUD Zilla looks back at the event and clarifies the "license feee" was never really about GPU licensing. It was more of a settlement, where Intel agreed to pay NVIDIA $1.5 billion worth of license fees to settle the nForce issue. For PR reasons, it was called a licensing fee:

The deal is over, and guess what, Intel didn’t announce any new license for the GPU, simply as this never was a GPU licensing deal. People close to the matter from several different independent sides have confirmed that the deal was never about licensing. AMD’s deal with intel turned out to be a Vega GPU stitched with EMIB to a Core processor and nothing more than that.

It was simply easier for Intel and Nvidia to call it a licensing and not the payment for the damages caused by cutting Nvidia out of the chipset business. Intel had a history of bully behavior and it didn’t take competition well.

FUD's article further explains that AMD, Intel and NVIDIA are unlikely to sue each other for violation of graphics patents, because they are all borrowing each other's ideas.