NVIDIA Says It Will Deliver ARM CPUs Spanning PCs to SCs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Says It Will Deliver ARM CPUs Spanning PCs to SCs

NVIDIA has announced from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it's working to deliver ARM CPUs for a range of devices from PCs to super-computers. NVIDIA plans to build high-performance ARM CPUs for a range of devices, including servers and workstations. Internally this is being worked on at NVIDIA under the Project Denver codename...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODk4NA

[Wyatt]

This may well be the most interesting prequel to a tech year in quite a while. Windows on ARM competing against the long-time stalwart Linux, in the ARM space? Desktop-class massively-parallel ARM/NV hybrid chips that do what Sandy Bridge does but better? Nvidia cutting into the space owned by Intel and AMD?

This could be amazing.

[cl333r]

It looks like x86 is not good enough these days since reports keep popping up that this and that company start supporting ARM. What does Intel plan to do to stop the spread of ARM which is increasingly likely to invade desktop PCs in the next 4-5 years (especially if windows 8 on ARM works well).

[TemplarGR]

It looks like x86 is not good enough these days since reports keep popping up that this and that company start supporting ARM. What does Intel plan to do to stop the spread of ARM which is increasingly likely to invade desktop PCs in the next 4-5 years (especially if windows 8 on ARM works well).

This has nothing to do with x86 being inferior.

The future is APU, cpu and gpu combined. NVIDIA had 2 options, either develop/acquire a cpu part or have the fate of Matrox...

They chose wisely the first option...

[Wyatt]

I'd also be interested to see Intel take a stab at a desktop-class ARM, personally. They've ever been the CISC company (Well...I guess there was the Xscale PXA-series. Bummer about selling it to Marvell.) and they seem to be showing no signs of slowing when it comes to extending x86 with new instructions (), so I kind of wonder if an ARM they fabbed would flop horribly performance-wise (like Atom).

[MaestroMaus]

Wow, 2011 is already more eventful and exciting then 2010!

/me is eager to see the benchmarks of the NVIDIA CPU's...

[BlackStar]

Nvidia has been turning away from the desktop market for some time, first with GPGPU-oriented GPUs, now with embedded-/small-server-class CPUs. This sounds like the culmination of that effort.

I'm a pessimist but I firmly believe that ARM cannot compete with Intel/AMD on the desktop as things stand right now. X86 is just too strong for that, both performance-wise and support-wise.

This doesn't mean that Nvidia will stop making dedicated video cards, but it does mean that it won't be able to compete with the CPU+GPU combos from Intel and AMD - which is becoming a very lucrative market.

[staalmannen]

I am currently a proud owner of a Toshiba AC100 (a Tegra2 "smartbook"), which I dual boot between Ubuntu-ARM and Android. I am currently trying to run as many PTS tests as possible on this device (currently from the Ubuntu-ARM on a SDHC card, not decided if it is worth it to try to flash it to the eMMC instead). I would love to try to do similar benchmarks under Android for comparisons. The general feeling is that Android is way faster than Ubuntu, but this may be due to proprietary driver issues etc, which may lead to an unfair comparison.

[TemplarGR]

I am currently a proud owner of a Toshiba AC100 (a Tegra2 "smartbook"), which I dual boot between Ubuntu-ARM and Android. I am currently trying to run as many PTS tests as possible on this device (currently from the Ubuntu-ARM on a SDHC card, not decided if it is worth it to try to flash it to the eMMC instead). I would love to try to do similar benchmarks under Android for comparisons. The general feeling is that Android is way faster than Ubuntu, but this may be due to proprietary driver issues etc, which may lead to an unfair comparison.

Ubuntu is much more demanding than Android, it is a desktop OS, not a smartphone OS...

[Silverthorn]

Imagine if AMD or Intel would reveal (plans for) a CPU which was capable of both x86 and ARM instruction sets. That would have been way much cooler than the combination of CPU and GPU.