05/01/2011, 06:41 PM
nVidia surprised everyone at CES today by announcing that it will be making an ARM-based processor for high-performance computing, aimed at desktops and servers. ARM is a CPU instruction set already used in most new mobile device processors today, like the Snapdragon, Hummingbird and Tegra 2 used in Android phones and tablets. Now, nVidia, until now producer of only graphics processors, is going to be the first to use this architecture in desktop PCs and Servers, a market dominated by the ancient and inefficient x86 instruction set used in processors made mostly by Intel and AMD.
Microsoft today also announced that it's next version of Windows will run on ARM based systems, which is crucial for nVidia's success.
This announcement breaks open the CPU world for the ARM instruction set and for a new challenger, nVidia. Where other companies have failed, this seems to be the start of an epic battle between massive corporations changing the entire playing field for computer processors.
Here's an official post from nVidia
Microsoft today also announced that it's next version of Windows will run on ARM based systems, which is crucial for nVidia's success.
This announcement breaks open the CPU world for the ARM instruction set and for a new challenger, nVidia. Where other companies have failed, this seems to be the start of an epic battle between massive corporations changing the entire playing field for computer processors.
Here's an official post from nVidia