Nvidia has been in a tight spot since the AMD / ATI buy out, and with Nvidia’s track record with Intel it looks like the only way to stay a player in this PC market is to become the 3rd player in the CPU market. This all is very possible with Nvidia picking up the majority of Stexar’s ex-staff a few months back.
Nvidia has not recently mentioned a buy out of the former Stexar which closed its doors awhile back, but it has mentioned its new Portland, Oregon, Design Center, where chip folk are hacking away on 45 nanometer designs.
NVIDIA IS MAKING a CPU, but the only questions are what kind of CPU, and how the heck is it going to do it. Making an X86 based CPU is not a trivial venture, and there are enough problems to make even a company with the engineering bandwidth of Nvidia cringe. Those problems are mainly called lawyers.
There is no doubt that given engineers, time and money, Nvidia is capable of making an X86 CPU. The Stexar people have done it before, several times in some cases, so it is even less of a problem. It can be financed, and while it may not happen soon enough, it will happen before Nvidia runs out of cash.
It will be very interesting to see what Nvidia is doing. If they are indeed making a 45nm CPU with built in GPU functionality it could give both Intel and AMD a run for its money.
Source: The Inquirer
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