In an article posted by InfoWorld, the company's chief technology officer for the Tesla product line, Steve Scott, was quoted saying, "Tegra is going to become GPU computing capable in the not-so-distant future. Sometime this decade we are also going to start bringing integrated CPUs and GPUs together in the Tesla line".
'Sometime this decade' is not exactly clear, but we would take a guess that Nvidia is shooting for a release prior to 2015.
Scott was referring to ARMv8 processors, recently announced as Cortex-A53 and A-57 models and a 2014 released date. However, Nvidia was not mentioned by ARM in a row of current ARMv8 licensees, which include AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics. However, the emerging microserver market is an opportunity for a natural evolution of Nvidia's business. Combining Tesla with ARMv8 cores will allow the company to compete in a segment that will be crowded with industry heavyweights such as Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments - and Intel on the x86 side. Nvidia will also compete with its arch rival AMD in a new market.
The InfoWorld article pointed to Nvidia's Project Denver, which will be based on using the ARMv8 architecture in Nvidia products. According to ARM, the Cortex-A57 processor will be able to provide up to three times the performance of its current flagship, the 32-bit Cortex-A15 design.
