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A co-founder of Nvidia Corp.’s denied rumours that the company has plans to enter the market of x86 central processing units (CPUs) by the company. This is hardly a surprise since Nvidia has no license to develop and sell processors compatible with x86 micro-architecture developed by Intel Corp.
“That's not our business. It’s not our business to build a CPU. We are a visual computing company, and I think the reason we have survived the other 35 companies who were making graphics at the start is that we have stayed focused,” said Chris Malachowsky, an Nvidia fellow and senior vice president of engineering and operations, reports PC Pro web-site.
Rumours about Nvidia’s intentions to build a microprocessor have been resurrecting since the year 2000, but Nvidia has never publicly acknowledged that, instead, it teamed up with Advanced Micro Devices to become a chipset developer.
Theoretically, own x86 central processing unit would allow Nvidia to offer its own computing platform consisting of its microprocessor, its chipset and its graphics processing unit (GPU). But even Nvidia does not believe that it is capable of developing a competitive x86 CPU in-house.
“Are we likely to build a CPU and take out Intel? 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,” Mr. Malachowsky added.
There is an advantage of offering top-to-bottom platforms for personal computers: it is possible to tailor each of them for every group of customers. Nevertheless, AMD could hardly capitalize on its desktop platform code-named Spider, which featured AMD Phenom X4 processor, AMD 780-series core-logic and ATI Radeon HD 3000-series graphics cards. Since neither Phenom X4, nor Radeon HD 3000 could compete successfully with respective rivals from Intel and Nvidia, customers did not buy many Spider-based systems.
As a result, Nvidia may not really need its own x86 CPU and platform, it needs to develop highly-competitive graphics solutions. The question is whether Nvidia will be in financial position to develop better products than AMD and Intel, who sell platforms, not just certain components, and get higher revenues. But then again, Nvidia’s goal is to stay focused, which means that it can spend a lot only on GPU development.
