In a Q&A session at the conference, Nvidia’s senior vice president of investor relations and communications, Michael Hara, was asked when Nvidia would want to get into the general purpose microprocessor business. Hara said that “the question is not so much I think if; I think the question is when.”Details are scarce, but I think this piece of news is related to the news that TSMC will be making Atom SoCs for Intel. Legally, NVIDIA can't make x86 processors because it doesn't have a x86 license, but it should be possible for the GPU maker to integrate Intel's Atom and perhaps also VIA's Nano into its own SoCs.
“I think some time down the road it makes sense to take the same level of integration that we’ve done with Tegra,” said Hara. “Tegra is by any definition a complete computer on a chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power, very small, but highly efficient. So in that particular state it made a lot of sense to take that approach, and someday it’s going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well.”
NVIDIA to make x86 netbook CPUs within 2-3 years
Posted on Wednesday, March 04 2009 @ 14:54 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck