Written by Nicolas Gridelet
Published on July 18, 2008

URL: http://www.behardware.com/news/lire/18-07-2008/#9840

According to the National Law Journal, Nvidia and AMD/ATI may be liable to a class action lawsuit charging them with price fixing. Without going too heavily into legal details, a Californian judge lent a very attentive ear to several plaintiffs that accuse the two GPU manufacturers of having falsified competition. This is notably due to an e-mail from Dan Vivoli to Dave Orton, respective Senior Marketing Vice President at Nvidia and the COO at ATI.

The extract of the message, which was made public, is relatively unclear (it mentions a collaboration on the marketing front as well as stock prices of the two companies that are too low) and taken out of context can be open to a number of interpretations. The problem is that defense lawyers are trying to keep other information confidential that could enable clarifying the situation and which are considered trade secrets.

Otherwise, the judge declared to the defense that, "This court is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of your companies. I am against you hiding information from the public.". While it may look rather bleak for the two giants, there are many points that remain unclear regarding what actually happened. In addition, they largely have the means to defend themselves and this type of procedure can be extremely long…