Nvidia Corp. has admitted at a conference that it does need central processing units technology in order to make competitive system-on-chip (SoC) devices in several years time. Moreover, the company said that in three years time it might enter the market of x86-based SoCs.

Nvidia has already developed its Tegra SoC that combines its DirectX 9-class graphics core as well as ARM8 microprocessor. The product has chances to become rather popular among handset and multimedia devices manufacturers thanks to rich feature-set as well as minimal power consumption, however, it lacks performance to become competitive on the market of mobile personal computers, where performance matters a lot. But Nvidia believes that in several years time it will be possible and will make sense to integrate x86 architecture-based microprocessor into SoCs like Tegra.

“I think some time down the road it makes sense to take [the general purpose microprocessor business] the same level of integration that we’ve done with Tegra. Tegra is by any definition a complete computer on a chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power, very small, but highly efficient. So in that particular state it made a lot of sense to take that approach, and someday it’s going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well,” said Michael Hara at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco, reports EDN.

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