Wednesday, March 4th 2009
NVIDIA to Try and Develop x86 CPU in Two to Three Years
Graphics market seems to be already small enough for NVIDIA, so the green corporation looks further ahead into building a x86 processor in the near future. At the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco yesterday, the company revealed that it had plans to enter the x86 processor market by building a x86 compatible system-on-chip in the next two to three years. Michael Hara, NVIDIA's senior vice president of investor relations and communications, commented:
Source:
Blog on EDN
I think some time down the road it makes sense to take the same level of integration that we've done with Tegra ...... Tegra is by any definition a complete computer on a chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power, very small, but highly efficient. So in that particular state it made a lot of sense to take that approach, and someday it's going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well.He also said that NVIDIA's future x86 CPU wouldn't be appropriate for every segment of the market, especially the high-end of the PC market which includes gaming systems, graphics engineering stations and many other. The x86 chip will be mainly targeted at smaller system-on-chip platforms. No other details were unveiled at the time of this publication. It's also very early to talk about something that's still on paper.
51 Comments on NVIDIA to Try and Develop x86 CPU in Two to Three Years
Better bust out some vaseline, Intel needs a nice rubdown.
And if they ever decide to go 64-bit they'll probably head to AMD's doorstep.
What can nvidia provide that others haven't already?
What would be nice is a SoaC made by nvidia put into some mobile gaming platform, and with some open source encouragement, nvidia could take over the mobile gaming market.
The CPU market NEEDS some actual competition, lets just hope they actually can compete :\
I'd be terrified of trying to play catch-up with the red and blue teams this late in the game.
*Imagines some sort of ultra-cuda processor core with 400 shaders that emulates x86 at a hardware level*
as much as you say intel plays dirty, nvidia has been just as dirty, and we all know
to tell the truth I would much rather see a merger between nvidia and intel even though that will never happen
Yea, its not fair that Intel is hoarding the rights to x86 but its their tech and they can do with it as they please. They only thing Nvidia can do is sue them for the right to license it, i think AMD, VIA and others had to do it.
So why is nVidia interested?
Probably because they have analysed carefully what Larrabee is doing. It's something somewhat unpredictable. Is it a GPU? Is it a mathPU? Is it a transputer? Whatever application(s) it will be used for... it is strategically dangerous. If DirectX12/13/NT or whatever has a very different feature set, perhaps suited to flexibility of x86, then hardware "general" shaders are limited. nV needs options. Also...
So many applications today are going multithread for performance. Yes, for gaming, you need at least one or two screaming cores. But if you are encoding, or rendering, or providing server services, you DONT need a single fast core, you are better served by many multicores.
Example. Webserver or mailserver. If you had a "core" per simultaneous transaction, then that would be unbelievably responsive to the users. Just like an old Pentium 3 is MORE THAN ENOUGH power to FTP or webserve just one or two "clients", then a pentium 3 quality CPU, but 512 of them, would more than happily serve 512 simulaneous requests. Moreover, with good powermanagement, when it sits idle, or just partly used, it will save oodles of watt-hours.
it bought out several companies in order to keep up with intel who was a much bigger company and still is
amd goes back to 96 but intel was back in the 70s and i think amd has done wonders to even come close to intel in market share and product technology
Besides, I don't see how Intel should be scared from a company like nVidia, even AMD being for years in the x86 business trails them slighly at that point (be it in terms of technology or pure finances), speaking of nVidia as a direct oponent in the CPU field simply isn't serious. The Ion platform is an intersting proposition, but it still relies on an Intel CPU. So if it gains popularity, Intel will benefit as well - in fact, much more than now, when many users may be held off by the outdated platform the Atom CPU is sold with.
The point is that every company nowadays is trying to expand its portfolio in a vain to maximize its profits, and that's the whole thing. There are hard times ahead, and being able to profit from as much products as possible seems like a sensible strategy. I don't say competition is bad, but numerous examples in other areas have proven that there simply isn't enough place on the market for, say 3, big players. If nVidia builds a x86 CPU, I don't expect it to gain much more popularity than VIA's products right now, as stated above. It's just too much fuss about unclear propositions with much more emotional value than practical one.
Well first of all, considering the power of computers today and the usage that most people do of the PCs, every nettop sold is one less "high-end" desktop CPU that Intel sells, and don't fool yourself, Intel's market is and always has been the high-end market.
Let's see, we are Intel, what do we prefer? Off the 500 million PCs sold every year, how much of them do we want to be full desktop with a $200-500 CPU and $20-100 chipset+igp and how much do we want to be $200 for the full PC??
Look Intel is BIG, because it sells big, if they can only sell smaller cheaper parts, their income would go down-down-down and that's something that not only they don't want, but something they can't afford because of the infrastructure they have to mantain. They released Atom, because every other manufacturer was releasing their competing products, and being that the market is going to change, no matter what you do, how much you fight, you're better off dominating that segment, because that way you can at least control it.
At the same time they have released Atom, they've been saying that nettops and the like had no future like main PCs, at least for now and it's true with their Atom. But oh! Here it comes Ion, a platform that takes that weak CPU and transforms it into something that catters the needs of 80% of the PC market, and Intel's strategy goes out of the window. That's why they've been downplaying Ion with absurd arguments.
No, don't let them fool you, they are very scared, not neccesarily of Nvidia, they can crush them as pleased, but another one would replace them (a known bad is better...). They are scared of the market trends, and of the fact that smaller companies like Nvidia are far better suited to feed that market: As I said each nettop sold (Intel or not) is one less Intel high-end CPU+chipset sold (much less margins for Intel), but with each nettop with a Nvidia-Via-whatever chipset is one more PC sold with a Nvidia-Via-whatever chip, because the PCs they are replacing had none. Intel already owns the market and this is saturated already, 90%++ of first world households already has at least one PC, so almost every new PC sold is a replacement PC in developed countries and countries in development: 1) are not a solution in the short term, because they won't be able to match the adoption rate of developed countries in past years and 2) they are going to choose the cheap PCs to begin with.
Put this on your heads guys, Intel is scared, very scared of losing the big$$ market they dominate with 80% of marketshare and seing it replaced with another one where even if they have the 100% of the market they would still be earning 4 times less.
/end of rant
I look forward to seeing how this turns out and i wish them luck as i did to the AMD/ATi merge. ATi pwn Intel in GPU technology, and AMD is playing catchup in the CPU department, but if AMD is able to match Intel or better it Intel will reign blood on all, or atleast try too.
The main thing is . . . Nvidia have stepped up the game. I wouldnt stress so much inregards to diversity because theres always those of us that demand better. Im glad the recession hasnt effected their logic.