Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 9th Nov 2009 21:29 UTC
Over the past few years, there have been persistent rumours that NVIDIA, the graphics chip maker, was working on an x86 chip to compete with Intel and AMD. Recently, these rumours gained some traction, but NVIDIA's CEO just shot them down, and denied the company will enter the x86 processor market.
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Member since:
2006-01-02
The discrete PC graphics market is going to dwindle more and more. It's just a matter of time before there won't be enough high-end customers to be worth it. That, or they will need to scale back, and only focus on those.
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However, mobile is only growing. Parallel computing, also, is only growing. Not only that, but there is a great deal of work that would be ideal for such processors, if they were easier to program for, and not so float-centric. nVidia happens to have some of the best support for that kind of work, right now (Intel will, with Larrabee, but I won't hold my breathe). It is not a 32-way 10GHz x86 CPU that you really need to keep up that forum website you have. It's for its database server to be able to utilize that highly parallel chip you got there in that slot.
The thing with Transmeta is not that they had x86 CPUs. It's that they had CPUs that ran x86 through software (in the sense that your CPU 'runs' Java), and on a much bigger process, had a chip about as good as an Atom a couple years prior, with a fairly light transistor count; and, that was with an integrated north bridge. They had bad luck, and made bad decisions (going x86 only, when they weren't x86 CPUs, and showed off how they could run other stuff, was probably the worst), but I think it's safe to say that they had highly creative people, way ahead of the curve, designing those chips.
Competing with Intel, IBM, AMD, and/or ARM, on CPUs: bad idea.
Making GPGPUs better at things they normally suck at: good idea.
Making GPGPUs better at operations that aren't traditionally number-crunching: good idea.
Making GPGPUs more efficient: good idea.
Making GPGPUs easier to program for, and creating better compilers: good idea.
...etc..
I'm sure nVidia could come out with a decent CPU design, but then they would need enough people to want to buy it, and avoid stepping on the wrong toes in the process. Intel (IBM, too) have shown in the past that they can afford more lawyerhours than you can.
But, if they do make a CPU, and it works well, I'd get one
Edited 2009-11-10 01:02 UTC