Nvidia Mulls Cheap, Integrated x86 Chip

CWmike writes "Nvidia is considering developing an integrated chip based on the x86 architecture for use in devices such as netbooks and mobile Internet devices, said Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia during a speech that was webcast from the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week. Nvidia has already developed an integrated chip called Tegra, which combines an Arm processor, a GeForce graphics core and other components on a single chip. The chips are aimed at small devices such as smartphones and MIDs, and will start shipping in the second half of this year. 'Tegra, by any definition, is a complete computer-on-chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power and very small but highly efficient,' Hara said. 'Someday, it's going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well.'"

Comments

Re:Prediction..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

x86 in an instruction set and a bunch of semantics. The decoder takes about 1% of a modern CPU, and if you're able to lop this off and run it on a GPU or something for cheap, your software won't care.

They should just go with ARM

[BikeHelmet]

They should just push ARM heavily. ARM is doing great right now. Companies like Texas Instruments are pushing the architecture heavily, and there's high demand.

Linux ARM support is blasting ahead, thanks to projects like the Beagleboard.

On top of that, a while ago Microsoft said they were developing an ARM version of Windows. Although we won't see it right away, in a couple years that'll open up even more options.

If they push ARM hardware heavily enough, software will follow. Heck, the software is already coming along, so they just have to market the hardware properly.

Most people won't know the difference between a linux MID and a windows MID. Both have "Email", "Instant Messenger", "Calendar", "Web Browser", etc., and if you need a new program you just download it... Nobody would even think of installing software off a CD, so most "Why won't this work?" scenarios won't even come up. It'll just look slightly different.

And once a couple game devs follow - or heck, a program like Google Earth - it won't be long before oodles of software is being ported, and the ARM-x86 barrier breaks down.

Re:They should just go with ARM

[Erich]

Sigh.

The reason to go with x86 is because ARM is just as shitty of an architecture.

Seven supervisor modes now? Horrible page table format? Have you seen what they are planning for 64-bit addressing?

Even more importantly than the CPU architecture, the ARM busses are typically very low performance. And if most of the time is dealt with memory movement, having a better bus dwarfs what's going on with the CPU.

So, in the end, you have slow cores. Intel knows how to make x86 fast. And, as they are starting to show, they can make it low power also. ARM has yet to show a fast core. They don't use that much power, but if "netbooks" are low end laptops instead of high end cell phones, a few watts is fine.

Oh, and did I mention that x86 cores are x86 compatible? That makes the software barrier to entry a lot lower.

To compete with Intel, you have to be better. A lot better. For very low end, ARM is better, because all that matters is leakage power, and after that all that matters is power for very small processing. At a higher level of performance, ARM is different, but perhaps not better. Maybe the ARM architecture has some features which make it less complex to implement than x86. But at the end of the day if nobody is making ARM cores that spank x86 cores, x86 will win. Didn't you learn this from PowerPC? Don't you realize the same thing will probably happen to ARM except at the extremely low end? And even there, if Intel decides to start licensing 386 synthesizeable cores, how long do you think ARM7 and ARM9 will last?

Re:They should just go with ARM

[BikeHelmet]

Yes, the ARM architecture is horrible and slow - but it also integrates really easily with other kinds of chips.

How long have we had ARM SoCs with CPU, GPU, MMU, plus a dozen other chips all in a single chip? An ARM "CPU" (SoC) isn't just the CPU part. It also has dozens of other chips inside it for accelerating specific types of processing, and all with remarkably low power consumption.

ARM is less complex than x86. Both ARM and x86 are moving towards integrating more and more stuff on a single die. Which do you think will work better - the simpler architecture (though not vastly simpler) with rapidly improving speeds, or x86? ARM has more experience in this area. They'll win.

You say to compete with Intel "you have to be better", but your opinion on what makes a CPU better is flawed. Power6 stomped Intel for performance. Even today for FPU stuff it's still about 100% faster than Core i7(per ghz - and it scales up to +5ghz on air), and I don't see it dominating the market at all!

ARM will win for these reasons:
-Lower cost.
-Lower power consumption.
-Much smaller size. (smaller devices appeal to many people)
-Similar/better performance for specific tasks(like video decoding/recording).
-Efficient software base.
-Appealing to device manufacturers.

Yes, x86 is compatible with everything under the sun, but everything under the sun is incredibly inefficient, and designed to run on desktop dual/quad-core systems.

You're arguing about what the consumers want, but you're thinking like a techy. If you put an x86 program next to a well-coded ARM program, they'll both run just as responsively, and at the end of the day, to end users, responsiveness is what determines "speed".

x86 may "spank" arm, but consumers think Vista is "slow" because it takes 30 seconds to delete a file that took 0.5 seconds in XP, and it requires more RAM. They don't give a shit that the kernel may be 5% more efficient. :P They don't care that they have a 2.6ghz dual-core CPU rather than a 2.6ghz single-core CPU, if it feels slower than before. (because of flaws with software)

All this puts the importance on software quality rather than the hardware. But software is easy, for ARM. ARM has no super-fast desktop line that would spur the growth of inefficient crapware.

Don't you feel lucky that we are to have tons of open source developers making quality software that runs on ARM devices? And piles of device manufacturers ready to push linux/FOSS software on these devices?

Too bad there's so few x86 device manufacturers pushing linux/FOSS. More support and demand would really spur growth of efficient software for netbooks and the like - but we do have Dell, I guess. :P

Re:Well, that is what netbooks do

[Jorophose]

Or external PCIe. I've been waiting for that. The PCIE standard has it specified, just nobody wants to make stuff for it. Think of it this way, you come home, you plug in a box (with its own PSU) into your laptop, and you can now game on your laptop with whatever cards you had put in that box. When you're done, unplug everything, switch your resolution/drivers if necessary, and go.