MediaTek sued by AMD for infringing on its graphics technologies

In some AMD news that’s not related to Radeon VII, it’s been reported that the company is suing MediaTek for copying its tech without permission. The Taiwanese firm has been accused of using technologies in its TVs and other smart devices that infringe on patents related to AMD’s GPUs and APUs.

According to Seeking Alpha, which cites a report from Bloomberg’s wire service, AMD is asking for royalties on a range of products from MediaTek that infringe on two patents. It’s seeking compensation for past, continuing, and future infringement, along with a court order blocking future infringement.

At the start of 2017, AMD asked the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to investigate claims that several companies, including LG, Vizio, Sigma Designs, and MediaTek, infringed on its graphics processing patents. One of the alleged infringing products is MediaTek’s Helio P10 SoC, which is used in certain LG smartphones.

The infringements themselves are related to technologies such as unified shaders, graphics processing architecture, and parallel pipeline graphics systems. AMD noted at the time that both Samsung and GlobalFoundries have licensed its IPs covered by the patents in question.

The ITC ruled in AMD’s favor in August 2017, so it’s unclear why the lawsuit has now been launched. LG settled with AMD out of court, so the MediaTek case could have been prompted by an attempted settlement in which an agreement couldn't be reached.

AMD has been making headlines following the announcement of its Radeon VII graphics card—check out the benchmarks here. Rival Nvidia isn’t impressed, though; CEO Jensen Huang called it “underwhelming” and “lousy.”