14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia managed to create quite a splash back in January when it first announced that it was developing a high-performance ARM-based processor code-named Project Denver, and now, Jen-Hsun Huang, the company's CEO, has released additional details about this upcoming CPU, including the fact that it will be based on a 64-bit ARM architecture.
The processor is designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers.
“To take the ARM processor, partner with them to develop a next-generation 64-bit processor to extend it so that all of computing can have the benefits of that instruction set architecture.
“It is backward-compatible with today’s ARM processors,” said Jen-Hsun Huang during a recent press event.
According to Bright Side of News, this was a clear confirmation of the fact that Project Denver will bring the 64-bit instruction set to the ARM CPU architecture.
This is no easy feat as developing such a complex chip can end up costing the company between 1.1 and 1.8 billion dollars and involve a huge amount of work.
The good news is that Nvidia is no stranger to complex architectures as their GF100/GF110 GPU's contain about 3 billion transistors, almost three times as much as Intel's six-core Gulftown processors which feature 1.17B transistors.
Furthermore, according to Jen-Hsun, Nvidia is “working on a CPU internally for about three and half years or so. It takes about five years to build any full custom CPU.
“And Project Denver has a few hundred engineers working on it for this period of time and our strategy with Project Denver was to extend the reach of ARM beyond the mobile, the handheld computing space.”
This would mean that Project Denver will be ready in the late 2012 or early 2013, at about the same time with the Maxwell GPU architecture, which could integrate Project Denver and become the first shipping graphics processing unit to boot an operating system.