Nvidia To Enter CPU Market

Nvidia confirmed rumors that it's working on a new ARM-based CPU for desktops and servers, codenamed "Project Denver."

"This is one of the most strategic and important announcements ever made at Nvidia," said Jen-Hsun Huang, President and CEO, Nvidia, at CES. "I think this is a game changer."

Rumors had been swirling around Nvidia for some time concerning the company's plans to move from its traditional GPU business to CPUs. The new development will make Nvidia more of a challenger to Intel, which has been engaged in a bitter rivalry with Nvidia recently.

Huang said Project Denver will be the world's first ARM-based chip targeted at high-performance computing. While Nvidia didn't disclose many details about the forthcoming chip, the company did say that Project Denver would feature Nvidia's GPU technology integrated on the new CPU.

Nvidia also said Project Denver was the result of a new strategic partnership with ARM Holdings that allows Nvidia to base the new CPU cores on the current and future ARM architectures. In addition, Nvidia announced it has also licensed ARM's Cortex-A15 processor for future version of its Tegra mobile platform.

Huang emphasized ARM's amazing growth and cited the company's success with how rapidly the computing industry has changed from being PC-centric to focused more on mobile devices.

He added that ARM-based processor sales are greatly outpacing x86 processor sales, and that within a few years the number of ARM processors shipped will be greater than the number of x86 processors that have ever been shipped.