Nvidia confirms ARM rumours

CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has confirmed the existence of Project Denver, which will put ARM CPUs and Nvidia GPUs on the same chip.

The Green Goblin is aiming the technology at nearly every level of computing - servers, PCs and supercomputers.

Nvidia announced its Project Denver at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This makes it the latest manufacturer looking to take up ARM chip designs.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it is creating a version of its upcoming Windows 8 to run on ARM-based systems in addition to x86-based systems. This might extend ARM-designed processors out of the mobile phones arena and into mainstream computers.

Now it looks like Nvidia is looking to take ARM CPUs even further, from PCs and workstations to servers and supercomputers.

Nvidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang outlined the plan, which is to create CPUs based on ARM's designs and integrate them on the same chip with the company's graphics technology.

It looks like Microsoft's adoption of ARM will be important to Nvidia's cunning plan, as that will likely provide support for ARM-based, lower powered Windows PCs based on Project Denver.

According to Eweek Nvidia has licensed ARM's Cortex-A15 design, which ARM unveiled last September. ARM officials said that the Cortex-A15 will offer features including up to 16 cores, up to 1TB of physical memory and support for virtualization that will make it a good fit for data center servers or networking devices. µ