Nvidia Is Trying To Make an x86 Chip 420
Slatterz writes with a story from PC Authority which says that "Word has reached us that Nvidia is definitely
working on an x86 chip and the firm is heavily recruiting x86 engineers all over Silicon Valley. The history behind this can be summarised by saying they bought an x86 team, and don't have a licence to make the parts. Given that the firm burned about every bridge imaginable with the two companies who can give them licences, Nvidia has about a zero chance of getting one."
What? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
it means that intel+amd have over 9000 patents on integral parts of an x86 cpu
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
it means that intel+amd have OVER NINE THOUSAAAAANDD! [youtube.com] patents on integral parts of an x86 cpu
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, well the "It Stopped Being Funny The First Time It Was Used" meme stopped being funny the first time it was used.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
(Score: overflow, Infinite loop)
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Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe Nvidia should talk to Motorola instead.
I'd love to see a modern-day version of the 68060.
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That's the Natami project.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
I'd love to see a modern-day version of the 68060.
You mean PPC? Just get yer screwdriver and head for the server room. Open the box that says "IBM zSeries". You'll find it just across the cabinet where the "IBM first prize" golf trophies for the "IBM Sales manager vs. customer cup" are on display.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>>>You mean PPC?
A common misconception. PowerPC is NOT based upon the original 68000 architecture. When I said I'd like to see a modern version of the 68060, I meant a natural evolution of that design, but still capable of running older 68000-based software (Mac OS Classic, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST/TT) since it shared the same instruction sets.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but the patents on the (generic) x86 instruction set are all expired, considering that the 80286 is more than 20 years old. So while Intel (32-bits) and AMD (64-bits) may hold a number of patents on the design of those chips, NVidia might be able to pull a Transmeta on them (ie converting the x86 instruction set to their own execution format as part of the Instruction Decode phase) without bending over for royalties.
If they play their cards right and get to market first, they might even set the standard for future x86 MIMD instructions. That would allow them to collect royalties from both the other players, much like AMD beat Intel on getting a workable 64-bit implementation.
But I think the odds are 90% that NVidia is screwed, unless they get a judicial clearance first (like a monopoly case against Intel).
I'm thinking the same thing, with a twist. Instead of creating a CPU, they might be trying to build a Transmeta-like converter to work with their GPU technology to support Larabee-like extensions to the x86 instruction set. Perhaps NVidia knows that the future is in hygrid ray-tracing with rasterization, and one of the ways to get developers to keep supporting the NVidia platform is to make NVidia's platform support the same crap that Intel is devising with Larabee. That way, game and graphics devs don't need to work as hard trying to fit Larabee ray-tracing techniques into a rasterization engine on the GeForce platform.
Thoughts?
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that Intel and AMD hold vital patents to the set of technologies that are part of the x86 architeture.
You realize patents only last 20 years, right? Some of those "vital" x86 components must have expired or be pretty close.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is all they want to do is use the high density chip technology they currently have to produce a 3 Ghz or faster 80386DX CPU ?
One with all the RAM it can handle as (core speed) cache?
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
You think it's funny until you see my Wolfenstein 3D benchmarks.
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
What would happen if you pushed turbo on THAT thing?
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...And now you know how they came up with the Large Hadron Collider! ;)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
why, the yellow LED next to the TURBO tag shines, of course
My Capital-E 268 did that, went from 6MHz to a roaring 10MHz
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Back in the day (yes, you're old -- just look at your UID), a friend of mine gave me a Baby-AT desktop case with an LED display, which he'd been using for awhile.
It was jumpered to say "HI".
This seemed at the time (and indeed now) to be the most useful function of such a thing. I left it that way.
That's my dream... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just 4 Gb of RAM, a 32-bit address, and make it as fast as you can. Forget about that 64-bit bullshit, I'm not running the Social Security database. But it must be on a single chip, or as close as it can be. Memory access times are limited by the speed of light once you get into the GHz range, a nanosecond is 300 millimeters.
To go with that, let's have some thousands of cores for number crunching. Mega cores, gig
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Ummm...yes? One's correct and one's incorrect. If you're going to do something, do it right...
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PAE has driver issues, still doesn't allow individual processes to use more than 4GB (in a way anyone is actually going to bother with), and is a hideous hack reminiscent of the windowing extensions used in the days when the 640k barrier was a concern.
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Another thing that people forget about is that AMD introduced extra registers with the Athlon 64, and those extra registers can be used to make certain tasks easier since fewer instructions would be needed.
When you run low on registers, it means you need to do a calculation, save it just to free up a register to do another calculation and around and around. Most people may not deal with the actual machine language, but when a compiler is properly tuned for a chip, it SHOULD make use of extra registers and
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Check this [cnet.com] and this [hothardware.com] articles. That shows the heavy politics involved between the big processor companies in order to be able to produce our beloved processors.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unlikely. The summary is right, nVidia burnt that bridge: I remember hearing that nVidia backed out of its VIA+GeForce plans to pursue its Ion platform.
Now, why the hell you'd want to give up the Nano, is beyond me. nVidia, get your ass in gear: VIA Nano + 9400GS chipset = killer combo.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
So why not just buy Via? They have the license to make x86, and more importantly they have low power CPUs that are ready to go, and with Netbooks and Notebooks taking a big chunk out of the market this would give them a BIG advantage in the market.
3 words: Ownership Transfer Clause
Intel is already waving that sword at the offsprings of their soon-to-be-late AMD competitor (namely, the question whether The Foundry Company will be covered by the x-licenses or not). Usually licensing agreements are set to be terminated if ownership of the licensee passes to a third party, so NVidia might even get a total of zero licenses if it buys Via.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually licensing agreements are set to be terminated if ownership of the licensee passes to a third party, so NVidia might even get a total of zero licenses if it buys Via.
So why didn't the cross licensing agreement terminate when National Semi bought Cyrix? Or when VIA bought Cyrix from National? Your speculation flies in the face of actual events.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to get rid of cruft, you don't start with x86. Many assembly programmers have weaped themselves to sleep over its backwards memory address model.
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
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um there has been massive amounts of changes to the x86 design line over the last 20 years too.
To the point where they are almost superficially x86.
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The current crop of x86 chips really are not x86 at all anymore, other then they present the same instruction set. Most of them are RISC machines with an x86 decoder, and a programable one at that bolted on. This is what microcode is all about. Intel and AMD can probably take their latest CPUs and with very minimal reworking make them act like a PPC if they wanted to do so. Which is not to say the architecture and features of the under line chip would be effecient for that, the designs are optimized for
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the above post really overstates what goes on inside today's x86 chips.
It is true that Intel and AMD internally break up x86 into simpler "micro-ops" to simplify the internals of the chip. However, the specific micro-ops uses are tailored explicitly for x86 instructions, and many match up with x86 instructions one-to-one. The mapping really isn't that programmable, either. Most of the mapping is hard-coded and highly optimized. It would not be trivial to support another ISA such as PowerPC, even for just user-mode instructions. If you then consider all the privileged instructions, virtual memory, and virtualization stuff, you have a real mess. It would likely be easier to start from scratch rather than try to retrofit a current x86 to be anything other than an x86. Sure, you could reuse some of the arithmetic units and memory controllers perhaps, but the core would have to change pretty dramatically.
That said, Transmeta (RIP) did have technology that would likely make it easier to run non-x86 code on its processor, and the translation was done in software. But even its internal instructions were likely closely match to specifics of the x86 ISA.
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The point is that you could make a totally different core chip and program the x86 instruction set to run on it. nVidia already has fast chips and motherboards. I think they are close to selling the whole package. Imagine a micro-ATX single-board system where you aren't paying for both a CPU and GPU. Small size and power, low cost and high performance.
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um there has been massive amounts of changes to the x86 design line over the last 20 years too. To the point where they are almost superficially x86.
If nothing else, from the Pentium Pro and Pentium II onwards, Intel's x86 line changed architecture radically to a RISC-based core and hardware translation of x86 instructions to native RISC ones- all inside the CPU.
Not even close (Score:5, Informative)
They may have the base architecture available, but not any of the fancy simd or 64-bit instruction sets.
First appearances (not necessarily patent dates):
MMX - 1997
3DNow! - 1998
SSE - 1999
SSE2 - 2001
AMD 64 - 2003
Intel 64 - 2004
SSE3 - 2004
SSE4 - 2006
Of course, most software doesn't use any of these extensions, but Intel and AMD can use this as a weapon in a possible FUD campaign.
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Except that Intel and AMD hold vital patents to the set of technologies that are part of the x86 architeture.
You realize patents only last 20 years, right? Some of those "vital" x86 components must have expired or be pretty close.
Except that it's quite possble that subsequent patents built upon the earlier ones so that even if the original has expired later ones will still make it difficult to duplicate the technology.
More likely is nVidia looking at their graphic controller patents and using them to get a cross license deal.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a simple way around this problem, however. They can get IBM to fab the chips. IBM have done this for other x86 manufacturers in the past, and it's covered by the cross-licensing agreements that they have with Intel and AMD.
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I would imagine that NVidia also has a fairly large patent portfolio where they could find many cases of Intel and AMD/ATI infringing in some way.
Also, how does VIA have a license to make x86 chips? I would imagine they don't have the ability because Intel and AMD decided to be nice to a competitor so, they must have done a patent swapping deal or paid a lot of money.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Intel licensed a bunch of stuff to VIA after a legal battle some years ago.
here: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2003/04/397.ars [arstechnica.com]
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is my understanding as well. Current Via chips are extensions of the Centaur design. Cyrix was a technological dead end that didn't even own any fabrication facilities. Name brand had to be the only valuable thing they had.
You're confusing chip design with licensing agreements. VIA sells the Centaur IDT chip design under the Cyrix licensing agreement. Cyrix' "name brand" was worthless compared to their real asset, which was a full x86 cross-licensing agreement with Intel.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could be.
There was a big fight in the chipmaking world over a bunch of patents covering hardware x86/Instruction set translation, which included multicore parallel instruction processing. They were originally held by a company called Exponential Technologies, and though Intel wanted them badly, were grabbed by S3 for ten million in an auction.
In the end, S3 and Intel agreed on a time-limited cross licensing deal. That agreement ended in December 2008.
Coincidence?
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Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like pretty weak speculation.
You can't, at least officially, patent an aspect of the instruction set itself. In terms of more general patents over processes useful in producing the chips, there's no reason why NVidia couldn't have acquired equally 'vital' patents themselves. Plus Intel and AMD are both in the graphics business too - do they already have suficiently broad cross licensing agreements with NVidia? I don't know and I suspect you don't either.
The question in these situations often comes down to whether companies are really willing to go nuclear and risk having the courts reject a lot of the crap with which they would otherwise intimidate smaller companies. If NVidia are willing to call their bluff then there's every chance they'll succeed. Being seen to use patents to prop up a duopoly isn't necessarily anything that Intel wants to be seen doing anyway.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except nVidia probably has a multitude of graphics patents that AMD(ATi) and Intel certainly violate.
Also, I really don't remember when "not having a license" was an impediment (remember Cyrix?? What about VIA?)
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Cyrix got IBM to fab their chips (IBM also sold re-branded Cyrix chips). This allowed them to hide behind IBM's patent cross-licensing agreements with Intel.
That was the terms of an early out of court settlement with Intel, but the situation changed after 1997. Cyrix sued Intel for violating some of their patents in the Pentium Pro. In the end, Cyrix ended up with a full x86 cross-licensing agreement with Intel, just like AMD. That's why VIA can sell x86 CPUs--- they bought Cyrix.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which leads to in important consideration. Yes, AMD and Intel hold patents vital to getting into the industry, but why did they cross license? That is simple: Intel had enough patents to have AMD by the balls, and AMD had enough patents to have Intel by the balls. Neither enjoyed being at the mercy of the other, so they came to a mutual agreement.
So now, fast forward to present day. Nvidia wants to get into the game. So how do they do it? Simple: they need to innovate and get patents on core technology before the other 2 do. Then they can agree to license it to one of the 2 to give them a competitive advantage. At that point Nvidia has half the necessary portfolio, and if things go well, the other will need to get their hands on the tech to stay competitive.
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That's not quite right. When Intel were *much* smaller, big customers (IBM particularly, but I think some US government dept also forced their hand), wanted second-source suppliers in place as a condition to Intel getting contracts. Intel cross-licensed with AMD in order to secure such contracts. Here's AMDs' version [amd.com].
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cross-licensing is a crock. It is done to try and head off any threat of legal action two or more companies might throw at each other, but the suspicion of that threat is not based on anything concrete. It's more about warm fuzzy feelings and to give the legal people something to do. It's also done as a protectionist tactic between companies to make sure no one else enters the party, and if they try to to ensure that everyone will be asking a lot of questions that can't be answered about their legality.
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Yes. Patents give the right to exclude. There is no compulsory license for patents. And there are no antitrust penalties for simply refusing to license patents.
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Yes, because the whole point of a patent is that you get a temporary monopoly.
Horsepower isn't the only thing! (Score:3, Insightful)
Most earth movers only use about 50 horsepower or less. (Think about stuff you see in the city or on a farm.) Most small cars have much more than that. A lightweight sports car will boast 300 horsepower.
The older architecture is quite capable of moving mountains especially since there is a lot of existing software that is already available. Using the latest technology for a complete computer on a single chip only makes sense for the manufacturing processes, not the logic.
I still use my Pentium Pro machi
Hrmm (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe they just want to run Quake 3 raytracing at 5fps. I mean who wouldnt?
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)
>>Maybe they just want to run Quake 3 raytracing at 5fps. I mean who wouldnt?
NVIDIA - for all your sphere and chessboard needs!
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What, they bought Strata too?
Logic says (Score:4, Interesting)
Nvidia are going to challenge the concept of licensing an instruction set, and they know they are going to win.
That will be a great day for all the technology industry and herald a massive price crash in processor power.
Patents vs. GPU (Score:2)
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At this point, I think it's ridiculous for any part of the x86 (or even AMD64) arch to be patentable. Almost every office on the planet has one --- you don't get much more public domain than that.
You can actually get quite a bit more public domain than that--patents determine who gets to make the chips, not who gets to buy them.
Or are you implying that every office in the world has their own fab plant and I didn't know about it?
Re:Patents vs. GPU (Score:5, Funny)
Or are you implying that every office in the world has their own fab plant and I didn't know about it?
Yes. You didn't get yours? It should have arrived last month.
Re:Patents vs. GPU (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually I was speaking on a much less technical, and more human level. My point was that something that we all use and that has become a backbone of our society has essentially become public domain by nature of its own success.
That's not how patents work. The McCoy automatic oiler saved milions of dollars in labor back in the age of steam locomotives. The fact that just about every locomotive had an oiler and that railroads were the backbone of our transportation system in the 19th century in no way affected McCoy's patent on it.
Re:Patents vs. GPU (Score:4, Informative)
Intel and AMD has been using hardware x86-emulators running on top of specialized instruction sets since Pentium Pro and Athlon. The last native x86-chip in production was the AMD Geode, and that one is dead now.
But GPU and CPU is still very different things. Performance on CPUs is very dependent on branch, and random-memory access performance. GPU's don't have real-branches and only reads memory linearly. NVidia is going to need a completely new architecture, and can only reuse some of the algorithmic implementations (fast float-point operations, etc.)
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this is an theinquirer.net editoral ... (Score:5, Informative)
how does pcauthority.com.au get away with re-posting others articles without even linking back to the original source (yes, I know that they credit theinquirer.net at the top, however it just links to all articles stolen from theinquirer.net).
I can't wait (Score:2)
The $2700 "gaming" CPU, coming soon from Nvidia. Combine that with your $800 twin video cards, and we're almost back to $5000 per computer again. The worst thing is, people actually buy these overpriced graphics cards giving them incentive to keep doing it. Well, have fun during the recession. I think MSI is going to make a lot of money.
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MSI has to be the worst quality part maker on the market. I've had terrible experience with them.
If I was betting on it, I'd say ASUS would have the most profitable year.
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Nope. Foxconn easily is worse than MSI, and the worst by far is a group of power supply names behind Allied and Ultra (Deer is one of them).
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I think part of the problem is that graphics cards are rather superfluous "bling" accesories, especially at the high end, that really don't serve much of a purpose. I haven't come across a game I can't play on "high" or "ultra" setting with my $80 video card (attached to a Core 2 Duo 2.6Ghz box, w/ 6BG RAM) except Crysis. But still the market somehow supports $800 behemoths that aren't really useful to anyone but kids who think $100 UV activated piping makes their computer faster, and perhaps high end vid
Some pretty big leaks... (Score:2, Interesting)
The day after he brought you news about Intel creating the Playstation 4 GPU [theinquirer.net] discussed here [slashdot.org] comes more industry shaking news, original article here [theinquirer.net].
Wow, that's two pretty big news scoops on back to back days for Charlie with both making Slashdot's homepage at the same time!
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And joining these two pieces of information leads to Intel needing some licenses on GPU technology, I would guess that nVidia probably have quite a lot of that, mayhap there might be some bargaining going on between the two over cross licensing agreements.*
*I actually have no idea but this seems plausible to me.
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While Intel and PS4 are pretty much wild speculation - based on logic (Intel is specialist in cheap chip production, something Sony urgently needs for its PS3), the nVidia and x86 are based on hirings.
While I will not go as far as to say that nVidia is attempting to implement whole CPU, it could be that they are trying to put CPU emulator/accelerator on to GPU. Scrapping the shader language and allow to write/compile plain C/etc which can be run unmodified on both CPU and GPU is a huge step forward to a
Re:Some pretty big leaks... (Score:5, Informative)
C allows for things that just don't make sense on GPUs. Arbitrary branching, pointer aliasing, etc. are poisonous for GPU performance.
GPUs excel at tasks that map N input values to one output value, with a minimum amount of unpredictable branches. If a task fits in this well, it is likely being accelerated already, via CUDA, Stream, CTM. If it doesn't fit, forcing it on the GPU is a waste of time.
What you want to look at are things like C++ DSELs, which create expression templates out of compile-time defined language specifications. This way, you can have a "shader language" that is evaluated at compile-time, either to a "real" shading language, or to plain old C++ code for the CPU.
Excuse my ignorance (Score:2)
Why does a firm wishing to enter the x86 market need to buy licenses, and if this is true, however did AMD come to own any if intel was the one who made x86 afaik?
Just wondering.
Re:Excuse my ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
Why does a firm wishing to enter the x86 market need to buy licenses
They're probably alluding to possible patents held. Of course, NVidia has them in the graphics part and could leverage that anyway. Just another reason why patents need to be scrapped and replaced with a non-exclusive system of financial incentive, if we need one at all.
however did AMD come to own any
Ancient history. AMD got into the x86 market in the 80's when the USG required multiple sources for many components, so Intel was more or less forced to let them in if they wanted USG business. Once they were established they've worked on improvements themselves which they license to Intel, etc.
Re:Excuse my ignorance (Score:4, Interesting)
Ancient history. AMD got into the x86 market in the 80's when the USG required multiple sources for many components
You know, in hindsight, keeping up this policy would have been a vastly more effective way of reigning in Microsoft than that ineffectual antitrust suit.
Re:Excuse my ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the day, many purchasers demanded that manufacturers of electronics had a secound source of components so you wouldn't get stuck with a product line you could no longer build. AMD was Intel's second source provider. This agreement went to court http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n1961_v39/ai_13734404 [findarticles.com] and the result was a forced agreement that meant AMD had access to Intel intel.
Two companies who can give them licences.. (Score:4, Insightful)
What about Via?
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I think the VIA x86 department was sold off to AMD, their last design became the AMD Geode, and then they died.
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That's Cyrix.
VIA still make CPUs, they make the old 90nm C7, and the newer 65nm Nano which will be appearing in systems this year.
As regards this story, I don't believe it one bit because it's a story involving the Inquirer and NVIDIA.
If NVIDIA were to do anything, I think they would be creating a far faster ARM based SoC for their Tegra v2 line, based around the ARM Cortex A8. Maybe they're making a hardware x86 translator front-end for it... not to perform well, but to perform well enough to accelerate x8
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No. Once upon a time there was the Cyrix MediaGX [wikipedia.org]; Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor, who rebranded the MediaGX as Geode, and subsequently sold the design to AMD.
The only involvement VIA had in the business was buying the Cyrix trademark and some of its IP from National. This IP supposedly helped them tremendously in getting Intel off its back [arstechnica.com]. And VIA keeps happily doing business in the x86 world: C3, C7, and now x86-64 with the Nano.
Where's the *proof*? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can think of a few reasons why nVidia might want a bunch of x86 engineers on-board, and they're not all "to design an x86 chip". nVidia have been pushing the GPGPU model for a while so having people around who know CPU architecture would be very useful, especially if they're looking at ways to emulate x86 assembler on their GPU architecture (which, for a few apps, would be an awesome feature).
The article is full of assumptions and conjecture. And it comes across as incredibly bitter toward nVidia. Did they turn the author down for a job or something?
Re:Where's the *proof*? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the author is Charlie Demerjian from The Inquirer. Some years ago Charlie broke a NDA, so nVidia has removed him from the pool of journalists given notice of new releases. Since then Charlie writes only negative things ("they are broke", "they produce only faulty chips", "ATI is much faster", "CUDA stinks", "3D glasses are no good", etc. etc.) about nVidia. I've a spam filter about "news" about nVidia by Charlie (it's a pity slashdot reports this junk...)
Summary = article = blatant copy of the INQ (Score:5, Interesting)
Shame about that, at least try and find some additional information and link to the original article. I didn't know that the INQ has become a news agency of sorts. They certainly don't have the credentials for that. And the author of this article even less.
Then again, we can discuss the idea that nVidia is apparently (no proof whatsoever of the hirings) going for x86 without having the licenses to do so. As I understood, AMD and Intel (and VIA) let each other use patents and designs for x86, so I assume this is about letting nVidia in or not on that scheme.
Personally I'm wondering why nVidia and VIA don't fuse. One just has created a neat little x86 CPU and low power parts the other has neat GPU's. And I heard that VIA is going out of the chipset business anyways.
See, I've started up the discussion for you. If you don't like it you can order up another if you don't think it's any good.
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Do all x86 manufacturers have an 'i' in them?
Ripped from The Inquirer (Score:4, Informative)
PC Authority ripped off this story, word for word, from The Inquirer. The author at The Inquirer, Charlie Demerjian, ought to sue their pants off for copyright infringement.
Re:Ripped from The Inquirer (Score:5, Funny)
More inquirer "news"? (Score:4, Informative)
The PC Authority site got slashdotted, but this sounds terribly like Charlie Demerijan's article [theinquirer.net] from 2 days ago.
And while Charlie's articles are terribly fun to read, they don't quite qualify as news. Call them rants, speculation, whatever you wish, but not news. At least unless they get picked up blindly [slashdot.org] by other publications...
Nvidia has licensed patents (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps they could be making GPGPU that with a translation layer for x86 instructions, like the Transmeta Crusoe did in VLIW, or maybe they are enhancing a Via Nano CPU design with on die GPU (rather like they did with the Tergra ARM11 chip). Either way this won't be a desktop CPU, and it won't be serious competition for Intel, but could be targeted at the growing netbook market.
Intel could step in and try to block them, but they have lost against Via and Transmeta in the past, and they would also put themselves in a difficult situation, since they are being watched in the US, EU and Asia for antitrust violations. This would look quite bad for them.
They already do.. (Score:5, Informative)
... sortof. NVIDIA has a 386(!) SoC [nvidia.com] from the acquisition of ULI.
I'm skeptical about a new entrant like NVIDIA gaining any traction in the x86 market, they would have better luck pushing out their ARM chips.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're forgetting that Windows has a HAL and Microsoft will be very happy to get Windows running on another arch if you pay them enough.
This could be a system to run x86 legacy apps without emulation and more modern apps on a super-fast GPU based processor.
Its amazing how fast bridges can be rebuilt... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have the cash, intel doesnt need cash AMD does.
Who's the Customer? (Score:2)
What I would really like to know is who at Nvidia thinks this is a good idea? Do we really need another x86 supplier? Are they going to aim for the low end or the high end? If it's the high end, I thought that Nvidia contracted out their manufacturing. http://industry.bnet.com/technology/1000386/nvidia-chip-problems-might-be-warning-for-everyone/ [bnet.com] Maybe that explains why the company has had trouble with some of its graphics chips in the last year or so. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-10020782-33.ht [cnet.com]
Litigate to Gain Market Access (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying that x86 is a technology that allows Intel or AMD chips to run very powerful software is completely off-target. x86 is a vast software market, which chip makers continually convoluted their designs in order to have the ability to serve.
In other words, it's quite clear that x86 is not a technology anymore and has become more like a standard, which all companies should have some fair access to.
Did I slip into Bizarro world? (Score:3, Funny)
I am confused. Or rather: I totally know what's going on.
Re: (Score:2)