Some have bemoaned AMD's recent financial and competitive troubles in the CPU market, fearing that the company may stop making CPUs, leaving Intel without a competitor.  Well, the competition in the CPU sector just might soon be heating up, thanks to a familiar face which is seriously considering developing a mobile x86 CPU.

An NVIDIA executive, Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at NVIDIA, announced last week that the company may develop an x86 CPU targeted at the netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MID) market.  The move would place NVIDIA in direct competition with AMD in CPU industry, as well the GPU industry.  And the move would also do little to improve the already sour relations between NVIDIA and Intel, the mobile CPU industry's top player.

NVIDIA's mobile offerings last year were marked with many tribulations and triumphs.  It weathered the disappointment of discovering that the many of its 7, 8, and 9 series mobile GPUs were defective, being overly sensitive to heat, causing premature failures.  While this led to some big losses for the company, it forged ahead with its Ion platform, which looks to blow Intel's integrated graphics out of the water, offering the ability to play high definition video and do 3D gaming on integrated graphics and a lean power envelope.

NVIDIA also released Tegra last year, an all-in-one chip that includes an ARM processor, a GeForce graphics core, and other components on a single chip.  Tegra is targeted towards smart phones and MIDs.  While NVIDIA did develop the ARM architecture CPU for Tegra, it has not yet developed or offered an x86 CPU to date.

It may soon, though, says Mr. Hara.  He states, "Tegra, by any definition, is a complete computer-on-chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power and very small but highly efficient.  Someday, it's going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well."

When asked when that "someday" might be, he responded that he couldn't discuss specifics, but a mobile x86 NVIDIA CPU may be coming in two to three years.  NVIDIA is also still deciding whether to develop the potential CPU internally or license its development to another firm.  Derek Perez, an NVIDIA spokesman, says no hard decisions have been made on this yet and that NVIDIA is still exploring its options.  If NVIDIA does choose to do its own development, it will likely have to purchase a company with rights to key x86 technologies.

With the rise of netbooks, NVIDIA is fearful of being left out of what may eventually become one of the largest sectors of the computer market, one in which two of its competitors -- VIA and Intel dominate.  That fear may motivate it to jump into the x86 CPU market for the first time.  From there, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that NVIDIA might one day produce desktop CPUs as well.

In the short term, NVIDIA hopes to incorporate the potential CPU into its Ion platform.  Currently the Ion platform pairs a low power GeForce integrated processor with an Intel Atom processor.  A processor of its own would allow the Ion platform to go 100 percent NVIDIA.

If NVIDIA does develop its own x86 chip, it has to tread very carefully, to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the failure of most recent would-be competitors Cyrix, PowerPC and Transmeta Corp.  Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight64, is convinced that NVIDIA is too far behind, and if it builds its own chip, the effort will be doomed to failure.  He states, "While you're busy (building your chip), the market would have moved on."

He continues, "[The x86 processor] evolved without a rigorous architectural definition. As a result, engineers creating a newer version had to ensure that it was compatible with all of the weirdnesses and bugs of the older one."