I’ve written about this previously, here and here. It seems that Nvidia is very close to releasing its own CPU/GPU combo. Which raises some interesting questions. Does it really want to piss off Intel or to be bought out by Intel?!
The Inquirer – Tuesday 16 January 2007:
A WELL-CONNECTED source says Nvidia’s G80 is as programmable as the average CPU. Nvidia’s flagship chip powering the Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS has, he said, almost everything that a CPU needs.
This may answer the question, can and will Nvidia make a CPU? Certainly the chip is not meant to be X86 compatible but it is apparently super programmable. We hear that it could probably handle X86 instructions as well.
AMD techies took a deep look at the G80 and confirmed the claims. G80 has all the features of CPU but it is big, hot and bulky. However, Nvidia still has to shrink the chip to make it cost effective.
Both ATI and Nvidia want yo make a combine CPU/GPU, and from what we hear, Nvidia may not be far from this goal. It needs to optimise this chip before moving to a real CPU market. G80 is still big, complicated, and warm but we expect its maker to move toward the ultimate CPU goal in 2007.
All Nvidia has to do now is get itself an X86 licence.
Smart cards, have been around for years, but disappeared not long ago..
A video card that DOES the work, insted of the CPU would be wonderful, but it dont need to be wrapped around the Intel processor.
Just get the DLL’s codecs and so forth OFF the system, and onto the vid card.
ECA,
I don’t think the objective is to make a replacement for PC’s. I think the objective is to make embedded processors/graphics accelerators for UMPC’s.
I have to wonder if there is really a market for UMPC’s though, as they have basically been around for the last 15 years, and have never really caught on.
On the other hand HP is claiming they have something new, and with the technology they developed they can more than double the transistor density on microchips without reducing the fab size. Maybe NVidia and HP will get together. They could probably challenge Intel and AMD at that point.
Also…. I bet Motorola is looking for a graphics accelerator about now.
They’re not that much interested into making a PC off a G80 instead off a core architecture. The goal here is to introduce a cost-effective alternative into some special purpose devices. A console springs to mind, but a smart controller for a HD video player is the natural target. With all this AACS processing involved, a hefty processor is needed. And the G80 already has all the silicon needed to process video, scaling and antialiasing, so a single chip could do all the work.
Furthermore, Graphics chips are being discussed as natural contenders on the supercomputer arena, as they’re basically massively parallel FP processors. And these guys don’t discuss peanuts, they have big iron bucks…
Ah, I forgot to mention that one of the targeted emulations would have to be the Ageia physics chip. This chip’s language is based on a already existent standard, so emulating it would be a trivial task for the likes of nVidia.