Business decisions in the PC/IT world often impact on innovation. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has labelled Intel’s new law suit against Nvidia as having just such a goal: "This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business."

Yes, Intel have launched a law suit against Nvidia, claiming that their current licence doesn’t give Nvidia the right to develop new chipsets to support some of Intel’s current CPUs and their future CPUs.

When I first saw a news headline about this my immediate thoughts turned to Atom. Atom and the Ion platform specifically. When Ion was first launched, the possibility of netbooks with Atom and superior NVIDIA graphics was something to be relished. The CPU power of low power consumption processors in netbooks is often not the biggest problem with a netbook’s overall performance, it’s the graphics that’s the problem. If you have a graphics solution in their capable of rendering HD video, for example, it opens up the possibilities of what you can do with the netbook considerably. NVIDIA’s CEO also said of the law suit “At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU.” And he has a point. But the Atom is safe from this kafuffle in any case.

I was reading only yesterday about the fantastic possibilities of an Intel Atom + GeForce 9400M and I was mentally planning content about tweaking such a netbook for mild gaming. But as I looked around for more info about this new law suit this morning I came across the news that Intel put the kybosh on the idea around Christmas time.  I must have been snoozing on the couch after a big meal.

“Intel told Digitimes that it has no plans to validate the Nvidia MCP79 chipset on Atom-based nettop or netbook platforms and also said it isn't looking to form a partnership with Nvidia to support nettop or netbook platforms based on the Intel Atom CPU.”

Such a platform is what the consumer wants, there’s no doubt, but Intel protects its business so much that at times, what could drive the evolution of something special is sacrificed. Not that they’re the only ones who do it. NVIDIA did it by closing off SLi and let’s not even get started with Microsoft!

Yes, it’s true, the world of IT business is cut-throat and self protection is the name of the game. Now if we could only hack an Ion Platform netbook together ourselves …