Nvidia has seen its graphic chips designed into embedded boards, but its plans to become a CPU company will include supplying processors to the board market.
At the start of the year Nvidia announced it was to build ARM-based CPUs running the Windows operating system.
Codenamed Project Denver, the single-chip Nvidia products include a CPU running the ARM instruction set plus an Nvidia graphics processor (GPU).
This processor stems from a strategic partnership, also announced today, in which Nvidia has obtained rights to develop its own CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture.
In addition, Nvidia licensed ARM's Cortex-A15 processor for its future Tegra mobile processors.
There is also interest in the embedding computing market.
Eddie Seymour, director of sales for the Tegra processor products at Nvidia, believes the embedded products will benefit from the fast design cycles of the PC processor market.
“ARM has been traditionally quite conservative, the PC industry requires a new architecture on a yearly cycle, this will play into our hands,” said Seymour.
Equally significant is that earlier this year Microsoft demonstrated a version of Windows running on an ARM processor from Nvidia.
MSC has an ARM processor-based Qseven module. Designated the Q7-NT2, the 5W module is based on the Nvidia Tegra 290 processor with dual core ARM Cortex A9, which is clocked with up to 1GHz.
The ARM/Risc processor architecture is supported by the Qseven Specification starting with revision 1.20, which was released in September of 2010.
Up to 1Gbyte DDR2 SDRAM and a NAND flash memory with a maximum capacity of 8Gbyte are integrated on the module.
The board’s 3D graphics controller GeForce OpenGL ES 2.0 offers a full HD resolution with 1920x1080 pixels. It will support MPEG4/H.264 video encoding (D1) and decoding (Full HD).
The HDM 1.3I interface and a second dual channel LVDS interface allow the connection of two large-scale displays.
A camera can also be connected via the 1x 8-bit BT.656 video input available on the feature connector.