NVIDIA may have been locked out of the x86 chipset market by that Intel lawsuit, but it seems to be reaping quite a few benefits from switching over to ARM, to the point where the outfit thinks things will change on the PC market.
That ARM products would come to seriously challenge x86 processors, if not steal their market share, has been said before.
This once, it is NVIDIA that is arguing in favor of this possibility, and the fact that this is happening around the same time as the supposed plans for a
13-inch ASUS ARM notebook is quite the convenient coincidence.
Indeed, the Kal El Tegra 3 platform will come to market in a few months, so
devices based on it are already being developed.
A certain NVIDIA representative now says that this is just the start of a process that will eventually turn the ARM architecture into the greater power on the IT market.
"Clearly, the personal computer experience is going to be dominated by SoCs with integrated ARM cores and GPUs. This is happening today and will be solidified by support for ARM in Windows Next. But as I said above, we expect that there will be a CPU + GPU market for a very long time to come,"
said David Kirk, an Nvidia fellow, in an interview.
Kirk thinks that ARM chips will make a good team with discrete graphics processing units (GPUs), the latter being set on a course of further evolution, since GPUs will continue to be an indispensable part of PCs for as long as games continue to demand high performance.
The NVIDIA representative also said that CUDA was not going to become an open standard din the near future, although porting apps to non-NVIDIA systems will still be possible.
"There are no plans to turn CUDA into an open standard at this point. Right now, the only processors we see being deployed widely in servers are x86 CPUs and Nvidia GPUs and these are all supported by CUDA toolkits today,” Kirk said.
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