nVidia's x86 project
By power666
Tue, August 17th, 2010 at 9:01PM CDTBusiness Week has the recent scoop of nVidia's much rumored CPU design. It is no secret that several former employees of Transmeta are on nVidia's payroll and they were indeed working on a CPU design. The goal: get an x86 compatible CPU to market before both AMD and Intel move entirely to system-on-a-chip architecture. By including graphics on the same chip as a CPU, nVidia will find itself in a niche market where their discrete graphics products become a premium luxury.
The catch for nVidia entering the mainstream processor market has always been a legal matter. The x86 instruction set is controlled by AMD and Intel through various patents. Via is the only company to have an up-to-date license for those patents to create a new x86 CPU design. Via's license is non-transferable so nVidia cannot buy them out and gain the ability to make their own x86 design. nVidia's last legal hope fell two weeks ago when the FTC settled an anti-trust suit. The only good thing for nVidia to come out of that agreement was that Intel would continue to provide an on-die PCI-e controller for a discrete graphics card for several more years.
So how nVidia was giong to enter the x86 market is one of great speculation. Rumors of their x86 project date back years so they did have the time to build an x86 chip from scratch. This direct approach wouldn't last long before Intel would get a legal injunction, block its release and then attempt to sure nVidia into oblivion. With the hiring of several transmeta engineers, it was believed that nVidia would develop their own code morphing schema to emulate the x86 instruction set using a different architecture. It was thought that nVidia would bolt on the necessary code morphing hardware to one of their GPU designs. Performance wouldn't be great but it would be functional to get a foot hold in the market. Another source claims that nVidia was bolting on code morphing hardware to an ARM based design. nVidia currently has licenses for several ARM core designs and presumably a license for the architecture in general. Integrating the additional hardware to accelerate code morphing would elimiate the power advantage ARM currently holds over the x86 market. Furthermore, the ARM designs nVidia has licensed are not performance competitive for desktop usage (they are fast for mobile though). To move into the desktop market, nVidia would also have to wait on a 64 bit native ARM design to emerge. With both AMD and Intel to release hybrid CPU+GPU chips next year, nVidia is under extreme pressure to compete but those forces may crush the company.
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