Nvidia's Project Denver May Feature x86 Hardware Emulation

In the 2013-2014 timeframe, Nvidia is set to launch its highly anticipated Project Denver CPU and a recent report comes to claim that this processor will feature specialized x86 emulation hardware, to better compete with its Intel and AMD rivals.

The emulation will be done via a hardware layer that will include some special instructions, just as China has done with Loongson processors.

According to Donanim Haber, this hardware layer should be able to emulate x86 instructions with just a 15 to 20 percent speed penalty, which is far better that the 30% overhead achieved by the Chinese MIPS processor.

This technology was presumably developed by the Transmeta engineers who joined the company back in 2009.

Nvidia has designed Project Denver so that the CPU can be easily embedded inside a much larger pool of GPU vector hardware and it will feature two of four ARM processing cores.

These are based on a 64-bit architecture and an early die shot of the chip revealed that it would feature a massive amount of L1 cache, which will most probably be much larger than the L2 cache size.

The chip also features a high-bandwidth interface which allows Nvidia to link it to a GPU memory controller.

While nothing is certain at this point, since Project Denver is expected to launch at about the same time as Nvidia's Maxwell GPU architecture, the two could be inter-linked to form a high-performance computing solution (with 2TB/s of internal bandwidth and 320GB/s of external memory bandwidth).

Project Denver is designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers.

As mentioned previously, the chip is expected to launch sometime in 2013 or 2014, but Nvidia didn't commit to any release dates.