Nvidia's been rumored to be looking to get into the CPU business, perhaps in an effort to compete better against AMD with ATI in-house, as well as Intel. But on that front, Nvidia would require an x86 license; and the graphics maker isn't on the best terms with Intel at the moment.
Despite that, Nvidia still has a CPU strategy – one that involves a completely different market.
"Our CPU strategy is ARM," Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told Cnet in an interview. "ARM is the fastest growing processor architecture in the world today. ARM supports (Google's) Android best. And Android is the fastest growing OS in the world today."
The end result is Tegra, an ARM CPU paired to Nvidia's GPU technology. The first generation Tegra is already on the market in every Microsoft Zune HD, but the second generation, dual-core Tegra 2 has yet to hit any commercial product.
As for Nvidia's chipset business, the license problems with Intel have effectively killed that division at the company.
"They (Intel) have disrupted our chipset business," Huang said. "The damage has been done. We've been out of the chipset business for well over a year, so if this got resolved we're not expecting to ramp back up the thousand engineers that we had working on chipsets."
