14 DAY TRIAL // In the first days of CES 2011, Nvidia told the world they plan on building a special processor that is going to challenge both AMD and Intel in the personal computing space, and gaming legend, John Carmack, seems to agree with the company's claim.
Called Project Denver, the chip that Nvidia is working on comes as a hybrid between a GPU and an ARM processor and is the company's first attempt at building a general purpose CPU.
Although not so many details are known at this point, Project Denver will most likely come as an ARM core embedded inside a larger pool of GPU vector hardware, as Ars Technica likes to put it.
Such a design should allow the company to split the processing tasks between the ARM and the GPU according to their nature.
As everybody most certainly knows by now, graphics cores are really good at running highly parallel tasks, like video encoding and rendering, so such applications could be directed to the GPU part of the chip while the ARM core will take care of the rest.
Although simple in theory, the design would require to link the two parts in an optimal way and that is not an easy thing to do.
However, John Carmack seems to trust Nvidia's engineers as it recently twitted its support for the project: “I have quite a bit of confidence that Nvidia will be able to make a good ARM core. Probably fun for their engineers."
Technical director at id Software, Carmack is particularly interested in ARM designs, its company pushing its way into gaming on mobile phones.
For now, Project Denver is still in its earliest of stages and it will most certainly take some time until the first chips built using this technology see the light of day. (via Techradar)