Graphics maker NVIDIA announced on Wednesday that it would be working with mobile chipmaker ARM to build a non X86 CPU, on the same day that Microsoft announced its Windows software stack would now work on ARM chips.
For years the industry has been rife with speculation about NVIDIA’s plans to enter the CPU space, dominated by fellow Silicon Valley giant Intel and smaller Austin based AMD. Until Wednesday, however, NVIDIA – which does not own an X86 license – had to content itself with making powerful GPU graphics cards. But that was before “project Denver” became a reality.
By teaming up with British chip shop ARM, NVIDIA sneakily gets passed the issue of not having an X86 License and has finally found a legal loophole to push itself into the space.
The initiative features an NVIDIA CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU.
NVIDIA premiere Jen-Hsun Huang said the move was aimed at building high powered processors which would be used in servers, supercomputers and for cloud computing. “Wouldn’t that be fabulous?” he asked the audience.
The CPU will be a “high performance ARM Core,” according to Huang, who also called the move a “game changer,” for his firm and the tech world at large. The move also enables the ARM architecture to cover a larger portion of the computing space, much to Intel’s chagrin.
“Denver frees PCs, workstations and servers from the hegemony and inefficiency of the x86 architecture,” says the NVIDIA blog.
“This is the beginning of a new era,” he said concluding, “The industry is redefined.”
