Nvidia denies it's moving to x86

Opinion: Rumours fly regarding Nvidia's CPU intentions.

In the face of overwhelming evidence on the world wide web, Nvidia is denying that it is working on an x86 clone to rival anything that Intel comes up with.

Last week the rumour mill was working overtime, manufacturing hell on earth for the Green Goblin by claiming it had hired Transmeta technicians to take on the mighty Chipzilla on its own turf.

The rumour seemed to be gaining so much traction that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang went on record to deny it.

He told shareholders last week that he was only interested in visual and parallel computing, GPUs in servers and those sorts of things, perhaps with a dash of mobile just to spike the taste buds.

The rumours were started, and continued, by Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech, who thinks that Nvidia will have to go to designing x86 chips within a year to preserve both GPU and chipset revenue.

Freeman's claims do not seem to be going away and some elements seem to suggest that he has an inside source at the Green Goblin. For example, he said that Nvidia might use Global Foundries as a manufacturing partner and last week Nvidia complained that TSMC was not allocating it enough capacity. That doesn't mean it's moving, but it is one shoe dropped.

However, Huang seemed to forget that complaint when he rebuffed the rumour. He told analysts after the shareholders meeting that "Global Foundries is AMD's fab. Our strategy is TSMC."

There would be a number of reasons that Nvidia would not want to officially announce a low powered x86 chip and it would be acceptable if Huang tried to string out the press as long as possible on such a plan.

Does this mean that Nvidia is still going ahead with the plan? It is clear that Huang has to do something now that the two companies are at war over chipsets.

A large chunk of Nvidia's business comes from its chipset business and it would not seem to be a good idea for the company to walk away from it. An x86 CPU clone might be a sharp move.

But we would have thought it would take the Green Goblin more than a year to get it into production, unless this has been planned for a lot longer than the rumour mill claims.

What is possible is that Nvidia is starting to think longer term. A much forgotten announcement by Bill Dally, Nvidia's chief scientist, indicated something that has been on Nvidia's mind is called an "Nvidia Exascale Machine", which the graphics company is scheduled to release in 2017.

The Exascale GPU will pack 2400 throughput cores (7200 FPUs) and 16 CPUs on a single chip with a TDP of 300W, delivering up to 40TFLOPS of single-precision floating-point processing power or 13TFLOPs of double-precision floating-point processing capabilities. Each node of the chip will feature 128GB of memory, 2TBps bandwidth and 512GB of Phase-change or Flash memory for checkpoint and scratch space.

However that sort of hardware is a long way into the future and does not solve Nvidia's immediate problems. It might be that development of x86 technology would fill a short term hole.

Either way it will take something a more than a Huangdenial to make these rumours go away.