This is not something of sudden surprise. This is what we call an extreme and unpredictable twist of a cheesy movie. The amount of battles between NVIDIA and INTEL in the court will need more fingers than you have, but now all the great wars are over. Out of the blue, the two arch-rivals (besides AMD) just announced a new six-year cross-licensing deal that will see Intel paying NVIDIA a total of $1.5b over the next five years for access to NVIDIA’s technology, while also giving NVIDIA a license to some of Intel’s patents. What? That’s not all; the two companies have also agreed to drop all pending litigation, because they’re now friends. Double what?

There’s a catch though as usual. Intel won’t give up rights to x86, flash memory or “certain chipsets,” thought that doesn’t seem to matter to NVIDIA seeing that their ARM-based Tegra 2 is now fully loaded for the mobile market. NVIDIA said on its press call that it has “no intentions to build chipsets for Intel processors (yet)” and that Intel will be able to use NVIDIA’s technology in Sandy Bridge, so this is rather interesting. Let’s see how the Optimus platform discrete / integrated switchable arrangement that pairs Intel’s on-die graphics with a discrete NVIDIA chip will evolve with this new deal.

There’s actually more than just graphics and processor architectures here, as NVIDIA will have access to INTEL’s Wireless Display 2.0 technology too, and the new Insider 1080p movie service. We might even see something that’ll kill AMD Fusion in the soon future.