LAS VEGAS -- NVIDIA is working on "Project Denver," a high-performance ARM-based processor designed for PCs, servers, and supercomputers, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said at the CES trade show today.
"What we're building is a full, custom processor developed at NVIDIA in partnership with ARM, that is based on ARM," Huang said. "This is the world's first ARM processor targeted at high-performance computing."
Right now, Intel's X86 architecture owns the PC market, and ARM's architecture owns mobile computing. Intel has tried to break into the handheld market without much success so far. Any entries by ARM into the desktop market, meanwhile, have been crippled by the fact that Microsoft, up until now, refused to develop Windows for ARM processors.
NVIDIA sees Microsoft producing Windows for ARM in the future, and Huang confirmed that Project Denver targets PCs, but he also sees opportunities in the server and supercomputer market, where many devices run Linux. Most Linux distributions currently run just fine on ARM.
"With Apple, Google and rumors of Microsoft supporting the ARM processor, this makes perfect sense," Huang said.
Huang didn't give any further details about Project Denver, including which ARM architecture it's based on or when the chip will be released. However, NVIDIA said in a press release that "NVIDIA has obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture. In addition, NVIDIA licensed ARM's current Cortex™-A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra mobile processors."
"This is certainly a game changer for us," Huang said.