CES 2011: NVIDIA Press Conference; Project Denver Announced

While most people reading this site will likely know all about NVIDIA’s latest desktop graphics cards, they also produce a large number of periphery products as well. Since the mobile market is currently at a significant crossroads, there are now some not so insignificant efforts going into further development of their Tegra 2 processors. Most of NVIDIA’s press conference revolved around this latest addition to the Tegra family but there was also some tantalizing news about something else being worked on called Project Denver.

Project Denver: Sketchy Details, Limitless Possibilities

According to NVIDIA, one of the fastest-expanding areas for profit growth in the IT industry lies with the ARM processor market. Everything from smartphones to tablets to some netbooks has been using ARM’s RISC cores but there remains a largely untapped sector as well: high performance ARM processors.

With Microsoft set to announce their rumored Windows OS for ARM, the potential for growth is exponential and that’s where NVIDIA comes into the equation. Unlike other licensees, NVIDIA has begun development of their own full custom CPU through a direct partnership with ARM. They have dubbed this CPU Project Denver. We expect to get additional information about it in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Here is NVIDIA’s official release on the subject:

Quote:

NVIDIA announced today that it plans to build high-performance ARM® based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers.

Known under the internal codename "Project Denver," this initiative features an NVIDIA® CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU.

This new processor stems from a strategic partnership, also announced today, in which NVIDIA has obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture. In addition, NVIDIA licensed ARM's current Cortex™-A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra® mobile processors.

"ARM is the fastest-growing CPU architecture in history," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "This marks the beginning of the Internet Everywhere era, where every device provides instant access to the Internet, using advanced CPU cores and rich operating systems.