If Wishes Were Chips, Nvidia Would Have an x86
Posted by mr bill | Posted in | Posted on 8:33:00 AM
In answer to a question at a Morgan Stanley tech conference the other day, Nvidia's senior VP of investor relation Mike Hara suggested that the graphics maven will try to get into the x86 SoC market for netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs) in the next two or three years.
"I think some time down the road it makes sense to take the same level of integration that we've done with Tegra," he said. "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."
Tegra is based on ARM and Nvidia's problem is that it doesn't have an x86 chip or a license from Intel to make one. What it has instead is a legal dispute with Intel over whether it has the right to make chipsets for next-generation Intel CPUs with integrated memory controllers like Nehalem. Nvidia says yes and Intel says absolutely not. Intel say Nvidia is restricted to chipsets connecting to the old-style Intel MPUs with a front-side bus and asked the Chancery Court in Delaware a couple of weeks ago for a declaratory judgment saying so.
Not that Nvidia doesn't need an x86 chip, because what it's got is a declining IPG market that used to bring in a tidy packet but should be dead and gone by around 2012 and a recession environment that sliced its revenues last quarter by almost two-thirds, forcing it to post a loss of $147.6 million, a situation that's unlikely to turn around anytime soon.
Nvidia could perhaps go to AMD for an x86 core or build one itself and have AMD run it up, but it's unclear whether AMD still has rights to make x86 chips since it transferred the majority interest in its fabs to its so-called GlobeFoundries joint venture with Abu Dhabi this week. Intel thinks not and it's going to use that argument to try to persuade AMD to drop its massive antitrust suit against Intel.
There is of course little VIA, which finally managed an x86 license after years of litigation over whether it could inherit National Semiconductor's license when it bought Citrix.
Anyway, Nvidia issued a statement after Hara opened this can of worms saying, it "continuously reviews its strategic options on a whole range of topics and one of them is the possibility of building our own CPU for system-on-chip devices, like Tegra. We will continue to review this and other possibilities, but we have made no decision on this matter and have no timetable for doing so."
In the meantime, it'll try to sell its so-called GeForce GPU Ion platform into Intel's burgeoning Atom market. Its Tegra product for MIDs is supposed to ship in the second half; so far Tegra's been pretty limited to smartphones.
Source:http://in.sys-con.com
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