by Anton Shilov, XbitLabs
Rumours about Nvidia Corp.’s possible entering the market of central processing units (CPUs) have been circulating since the year 2000, well before unified shader architecture or computing shaders, but the company has never confirmed such plans. But now that the intentions have been reaffirmed, it looks like Nvidia has been working on a microprocessor, or, at least, related technologies for quite some time now.
Graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units used to have almost nothing in common a decade ago, but huge advances in the graphics chip design as well as the evolution of CPUs have greatly moved both towards each other: GPUs are now much more programmable than back in the days, whereas microprocessors now feature many cores, built-in memory controllers and will soon even gain graphics engines. So, the same way that consumer electronics is converging with personal computer, CPUs are converging with GPUs.
