In early 2009 Intel sued NVIDIA over their 2004 chipset licensing agreement that let NVIDIA make core-logic (chipsets) for Intel in exchange for Intel licensing NVIDIA´s 3D, GPU and other patents. NVIDIA made the chips for their nForce series chipset and the two-chip ION Platform. ION´s combination of Nvidia and Intel chipsets provided at the time 10x performance over Intel-only chipsets and was popular in Apple notebooks etc. Intel claimed their agreement did not cover their newer Nahelem architecture which featured an integrated memory controller. NVIDIA countersued. The USD 1.5 billion settlement in January 2011 barred NVIDIA from making CPUs with Intel´s x86 technology. Nvidia GPUs have since been relegated to connecting to Intel CPUs via the relatively slow PCIe buses. This is also why you today have IBM´s Power CPU connected to Nvidia´s GPUs over NVLINK, but no such connections for Nvidia. AMD have similarly connected their CPUs and GPUs via their HyperTransport technology.