Post from James Cally
of Cloud Mobile Guys, Butte MT. 8-1-10
"Can a "hot" and excciting,and indigenously designed CPU help Nvidia compete against industry
heavyweights such as Intel and AMD?
Well, according to Clear-Cloud's top developer, Tom Nullery, Nvidia has little choice but to develop such
a CPU if it hopes
to maintain and improve its current market position.
"They are between a rock and a hard place," Nullery told Clear-Cloud
Network.
"Nvidia doesn't have that much
time. Their Platform is
under pressure."
Indeed,
the company is already working on a new microprocessor for tablet devices that is expected to "compete directly"
with Intel products.
"Nvidia
began working on a [new] tablet chip after an earlier effort to create laptop processors didn't pan out...Those chips weren't
cheap enough to compete with Intel's Atom chips," explained Tech_Guys Pros Channy Singh.
"The effort would help Nvidia tap
the burgeoning market for tablets, spurred by the success of Apple's iPad. It also may serve as a counterattack against Intel
and AMD as they encroach more onto Nvidia's home turf of graphics chips."
The nascent CPU project is reportedly based on technology
developed by Transmeta and uses s/w to replicate the way Intel (x86) chips work.
However, he noted that previous efforts by Transmeta to design an x86 emulator had failed.
"It's hard
to deliver enough performance to run computer programs like Microsoft Windows fast enough," he added.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang
told us that
the company's CPU strategy was based solely on ARM architecture.
"Our CPU strategy is ARM...[It] is the fastest growing processor architecture in the
world today. ARM supports
Android best. And Android is the fastest growing OS in the world today," he emphasized.
"[Our] dual-core Tegra 2 chips currently comes
in two flavors, the AP20 for smartphones and the T20 for tablets. And both of them are being designed into products."
