News - Microsoft has right of refusal on NVIDIA takeovers

[HEXUS]

Interesting, but the agreement has been in place for 11 years.

Read more.

[K3V]

which i guess, could also put others off from looking too far into purchasing nvidia knowing all their hard work working out an offer etc.. even on the quiet, means nothing given microsoft instantly have a chance to acquire first ahead of any other offer.........(could this have even put AMD off from purchasing NVIDIA over ATI in 2006??)

[OilSheikh]

Doesn't the XBOX use an ATi X1900 based card ?

[Blackmage]

Doesn't the XBOX use an ATi X1900 based card ?

Thats what i was thinking and the PS3 an Nvidia GPU

[3dcandy]

Microsoft (I would have thought) has already weighed up buying NV a million times. However, I bet it's not happy about supplying chips to rivals and I bet the licensing issues would be a nightmare to overcome. Could also be that NV doesn't want to be taken over either. I'm sure that AMD started and found out it would have crippled them (mind you ATI wasn't much better)

[brasco]

Thats what i was thinking and the PS3 an Nvidia GPU

Playing the business game there or just spread betting

brasc

[scaryjim]

The xbox 360 uses an ATI Xenos which is X1900 based. The original xbox used an NVidia GPU and system chipset which was GeForce 4 Ti based. The agreement dates back to the original xbox, but presumably had a fairly lengthy run in terms of validity (it'd be interesting to know exactly how long the license agreement lasts!).

Clearly ATI didn't get tied into any such agreement, as their take-over by AMD was announced *after* they were contracted to provide the graphics for the xbox 360.

Certainly if that clause is still in effect it puts Microsoft in a very strong position, with the current rapid rate of development of mobile processors.

[Scott B]

This is going back to the original Xbox of ten years ago, which I believe was NVIDIA. The 360 is ATI, or so I read.

Ah, scaryjim just beat me to it