Nvidia Firmly Denies Plans To Build a CPU

Barence writes "A senior vice president of Nvidia has denied rumours that the company is planning an entry into the x86 CPU market. Speaking to PC Pro, Chris Malachowsky, another co-founder and senior vice president, was unequivocal. 'That's not our business,' he insisted. 'It's not our business to build a CPU. We're a visual computing company, and I think the reason we've survived the other 35 companies who were making graphics at the start is that we've stayed focused.' He also pointed out that such a move would expose the company to fierce competition. 'Are we likely to build a CPU and take out Intel?' he asked. 'I don't think so, given their thirty-year head start and billions and billions of dollars invested in it. I think staying focused is our best strategy.' He was also dismissive of the threat from Intel's Larrabee architecture, following Nvidia's chief architect calling it a 'GPU from 2006' at the weekend."

Comments

Anyone Surprised?

[Underfoot]

Is anyone actually surprised that the CEO is denying this? Even if the rumors were true, letting news out to market about it would give Intel time to prepare a response (and legal action).

Reprogrammable GPU?

[Wills]

When hell freezes over, they could release a GPU where the instruction set is itself microprogrammable with open-source design, and then end users could decide whether they want to load the GPU's microcode with an x86 instruction set, a dsp set, or whatever.

x86 rumors origin ?

[DrYak]

Currently nVidia is partnering with VIA for small form factor x86 boxes. And they have made several presentation about a combination of (VIA's) x86-64 Issaiah and (their own) embed GeForce.
Touting that the platform would be the first small form factor able to sustain Vista in all DX10 and full Aero glory.

Maybe that is where some journalist got mixed and where all this "nVidia is preparing a x86 chip" rumor began ?

Re:From 2006

[Lumpy]

The alpha failed because the motherboards were $1300.00 and the processors were $2600.00 nobody in their right mind bought the stuff when you could get Intel motherboards for $400 and processors for $800.00 (dual proc boards, high end processors)

DEC died because they could not scale up to what the intel side was doing. you had thousands of motherboards made per hour for Intel with maybe 4 a day for Alpha. It's game over at that point.

I loved the Alphas, I had a dual alpha motherboard running windows NT it rocked as a server.

Re:How nVidia "Survived"

[alen]

3dfx's problem was they could never figure out how they sold their cards. they flipped flopped from themselves to having others make the cards like Nvidia does. after so many times no one wants anything to do with you because it's bad for business planning.

nvidia has had it's current selling model for 10 years and only its partners have changed. if you want to sell video cards you can trust that if you sell cards based on nvidia's chips they won't pull the rug out from under you next year and decide to sell the cards themselves

Re:How nVidia "Survived"

[Bruce Perens]

Pixar had an OEM model too, back in its days of making hardware and software products (the Pixar image computer, Renderman, Renderman hardware acceleration) while waiting for the noncompete with Lucasfilm to run out. It's a very difficult way to run a business, because you have to pull your own market along with you, and you can't control them.

It does look like 3DFx bought the wrong card vendor. They also spun off Quantum3D, then a card vendor, which is still operating in the simulation business.