Rumour control: Nvidia hints at CPU with integrated graphics

Posted at: 11:55am 10th March 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Nvidia already has the technology; it's just a question of what it does with it

Rumours about an Nvidia desktop CPU are extremely common these days, but Nvidia has so far kept curiously quiet about the matter. However, Nvidia today hinted that there may be plans for a CPU that's capable of more than just general processing.

Nvidia's director of product PR for EMEA and India, Luciano Alibrandi rightly pointed out to Custom PC that 'Nvidia does produce a CPU' in the form of the APX2500. As Alibrandi says, the APX2500 'includes a CPU, graphics, video processing, imaging, display and I/O functionality on a single chip.' Basically, Nvidia already has the technology to produce a CPU, so it's a question of where it takes this technology in the future.

'CPUs are not particularly magical,' Alibrandi told Custom PC, 'they are designed and sold by a wide range of companies, big and small.' However, he also added that 'from our perspective, the interesting problems and computing problems to be solved for the next century are highly parallel, and require a combination of heterogeneous processing that a CPU alone simply cannot address.'

Of course, this ambiguous statement could mean allsorts of things, including Nvidia simply trying to use GPUs for more general computing tasks, as it does with its CUDA language, and leaving the CPU work to Intel. However, what's interesting is that there's no flat denial that Nvidia is considering producing a CPU, which is what we asked about. This is particularly curious when you consider that Nvidia's CEO, Jen Hsun-Huang, previously said that Nvidia 'is not going into that business' in June last year.

This suggests to us a hint that Nvidia has changed its plans and is considering developing an all-in-one part, perhaps similar to AMD's Fusion technology, which can act as both a multi-core CPU and GPU, and may also have other features such as an integrated memory controller.

This is all speculation, of course, but it looks like a hint to us. Could Nvidia compete with Intel and AMD in the CPU market if it was to produce an all-in-one chip? Let us know your thoughts.