Nvidia CEO Says No x86 Chips

Not surprising. Obtaining the licensing for x86 would be a nightmare especially after they spit in intel's face with their cartoons.

Well, I think they may be looking to develop a CPU of some kind, just not an x86 chip. After all, it appears that nvidia has been hiring Transmeta engineers. The Transmeta chips were not true x86 chips, but rather use a Very Long Instruction type of microcode. While in the case of transmeta x86 instructions were translated to VLI on the chip itself, S3 used the same technology to implement 2.0 shaders on their GPUs when they got back into the GPU game.

Anyway, we could see NVIDIA develop a MIPS or other architecture CPU to pair with their Tegra and market it at a super computer or rendering machine. With so many movie studios needing to produce full 3D CGI movies, or simply have heavy CGI effects, nvidia may be able to steel some space away from the traditional providers in this area.

Hasn't the license for x86 32bit expired? I can't remember.

I see no reason why they shouldn't join in the x86 fun when they're back on track with their gpu's

Awww

If they did make one I think they could come up with something interesting

i just want my 8 core 12 threads i11 already.

In a nutshell right there. Even talking about CPU while they are late to the dance with their specialty product would be ridiculous. I take no issue with Nvidia coming into the market as a CPU manufacturer but right now I think they need to tend to their bread and butter products. They are not in the lead anymore and you need to secure the crown in one area before branching out in others or you risk being associated with mediocrity. AMD/ATI is pumping out one good product after another so there wont be another 2 year stretch of re-branding to look forward to.

Another Nvidia statement completely void of gaming support. Big surprise.

what they should be focusing on is putting out those DX11 Fermi stuff out to the gamer community..., you know the only group that has been bankrolling their ass all these years?

I want them to produce x86 chips. I've encouraged everyone I know to only buy ATI stuff since we all learned how evil Intel is. I just bought an ATI laptop too.

megamanx00 has the right idea.
I don't think NVIDIA is going to release an x86 chip, they'll be doing something with the Transmeta tech.

One part where he's wrong tho... The Tegra IS an ARM processor, so there is no need at all to pair it with a MIPS.

Tegra isn't designed, and prolly never will be designed for anything other than the embedded market. The most likely solution for them to become a provider for server or desktop CPUs is via the Transmeta route.

I'm curious about how they plan to implement it, since they lean towards many many small cores, are we going to be seeing 256 or 512 core computers from them? They would be slow and painful to operate on anything other than heavily threaded environments, but I can see some use for them in the Server world. Tho, it may cut into their CUDA marketshare if the position it for such things

sounds like they're interested in creating gpu based chipsets to run devices other than pc's

Perhaps they are just hiring staff with processor experience to help boost development of mainstream application processing using CUDA?

Surprising that we are still using x86 instruction sets. Thought we would be beyond it by now. Unfortunately with Intel holding all the aces and ownership of said instructions computing will stay with meager improvements.

For anyone who has seen x86 code they know what I'm talking about. Too bad no one has the resources/personnel that Intel has to come up with something better.

Couldn't they just call their architecture x86^-1, its not like people dont do this with patents all the time .

NVIDIA SAVE US FROM INTEL AND MAKE SOME CHIPS

I know that Nvidia is a hardware vendor, but honestly... maybe they should change the name to TomsPolitics.com
I miss the days when they gave detailed info on overclocking and how to tweak your pc to get the best out of it. Unbiased articles and guides... remember those old articles like how to connect L3 bridges on the old Tbreds? Used to learn so much from this site. Nowadays it's all just, AMD sues intel over this, MS getting sued over that, Apple getting sued over exploding iPods... I find myself coming on here more for the reader comments anymore than the actual articles lol

nVidia can use the portions of x86 that are no longer under patent, but they'd still lack MMX, 3DNow!, SSE and x86-64....which means they'd be releasing a 32bit processor, which wouldn't be a financially sound idea. You can't compete using outdated technology. Given nVidia's history of insulting their competition, I find it very unlikely that AMD will license x86-64 to nVidia. AMD only gave Intel a license due to fair competition laws. As far as nVidia using Transmeta's tech...not possible, as Intel bought the rights to ALL of Transmeta's patents when they bought out Transmeta. Having Transmeta's patents made the Core i7 processors possible. QPI used by Core i7, another form of AMD's HyperTransport, was patented by Transmeta....who also worked to help develop AMD's HyperTransport bus...

The problem with calling an instruction set "x86^-1", is the fact that they can't use anything that's still covered by a valid patent....

I think that now since AMD is ahead in games, they're trying to push themselves as a more professional company with CUDA and such.

I agree, though I don't think it has anything to do with AMD being ahead, just more of the fact that they can't rely on their chipset business to be their major source of income due AMD now making their own.

They seem to be taking a position of: rather than delving into what they don't know (x86) they're sticking with trying to find ways to use what they do know, their own GPUs as GPGPUs, or graphics technology beyond video cards and desktops, and into phones (or consoles, since they won the "next WII" contract w/ Nintnedo).

I guess it makes sense, it could be their market specialization that keeps them alive. It's the same specialization that brought AMD ahead with the Athlon architecture because they didn't concern themselves with chipsets, or graphics.

Usually these chinese people can lie very well!
Same was for the PSP Go! It was not in production, but still couple of months later released.

But I can understand him. It'd be very difficult to get a revenue from producing competitors to the Atom chip, which is the only chip they most likely can bounce up to.
Intel and AMD are pretty strong in the higher CPU's.

NVidia is most likely pairing with ARM type of processors.
The extreme low power processors.
Nvidia should learn how to get low power chips that perform as well!

Nvidia can diversify into all kinds of visual and parallel computing market segments it's probably just like was stated.

AMD should buy Nvidia... that would be funny seeing Intel trapped alone in needs of doing their own graphic chips...

If they chose VIA which acquired Cyrix, x86 was reverse engineered by Cyrix and no license would be needed.VIA Technologies doesn't have anything on par in terms of performance as AMD's or Intel's CPU's.
None the less it would be a possibility although most likely it would never happen.

Oh well. Let's see what they do in the mobile market.

Well Via C7 / Nano does have something that current Intel / AMD CPU's can't compete with. Their on board AES-256 hardware encryption / quantum random number generator / SHA-256/512 hashing which is all done in the CPU. You need the encryption library compiled to support it because its a separate set of assembly instructions that need to be called, this pretty much restricts it to the Linux world and any Windows applications that are specially compiled of it.

I really wish Intel / AMD would do this with their own CPU's. It makes encryption insanely fast.

Quote"I would like to see AMD buy Nvidia" I would also like to see this but Nvidia is twice the size of AMD so it won't happen unless AMD's stock price went up about 4 times what it is today & Nvidia stayed about the same value. I wouldn't be surprised if they merged in the future if AMD ever got out of debt. Nvidia might have to buy AMD at some point or be bought by them just to stay in business.

Bad idea since their current focus is their new GTX3xx series and they are delayed. I dont think they have the current resources or at least time to create a r & d and assembly line fast enough to compete with Intels new chips while dealing with Ati on the GPU front. Nvidia has taken a seat behind Ati and AMD for now in the GPU market as well as the on board gpu market. Nvidia has lost the onboard Motherboard gpu war already.

It would be unfair if i only criticized i guess...
So, great article, exactly what i wanted to read.

thanks.

I would love to see one more cpu in the mix.. competition would be great for consumers.

I think they should. Then nvidia can sign an exclusivity deal with apple and Jen-Hsun Huang and Steve Jobs could start spending all day together making sweet love down by the fire brokeback style.