Patent lawsuits are without a doubt one of the more boring topics in technology. It takes a lot of drama to make it interesting, but the case between Samsung (and Qualcomm) and NVIDIA has hit that bar. See, NVIDIA sued Samsung/Qualcomm in late 2014 for infringing three of its patents, but Samsung sued back with three of its own. Now, NVIDIA has lost its case, and Samsung won on all three counts. Burn.

We're not going to get into the minutiae of what each patent covers, because again, patents are mega-boring. The gist is that NVIDIA thought the Exynos and Snapdragon GPUs infringed on one of its patents, but the International Trade Commission judges didn't see it that way. The panel ruled that two of NVIDIA's patents were not being infringed and actually threw out the third one as invalid.

Meanwhile, Samsung countersued with some pretty old patents, one of which is about to expire. Still, the ITC found that NVIDIA is infringing Samsung's patents on SRAM buffer, a shared computer bus system, and memory sub-systems with a data strobe buffers. I don't know what that means, and I assume most of you don't either. At any rate, NVIDIA is not pleased and hopes the full ITC panel will reverse the ruling when it reviews the case in a few months. Samsung asked the ITC to ban sales of certain NVIDIA products in the US, but things don't usually go that far. Someone will pay someone else when the case wraps up, which might take years. Patents, man.