It's the NVIDIA rumor that won't die: no, not the one where the GPU maker buys tiny VIA, but the other one, where it jumps feet-first into competition with both Intel and AMD by producing an x86 processor of its own. The idea has cropped up again in an analyst note from Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech, in which Freedman claims that NVIDIA has been hiring former Transmeta engineers to work on a secret x86 processor that will appear sooner rather than later. In the note seen by the EE Times, Freedman emphasizes that NVIDIA not will take on Intel's Core i5/i7 lineup. Rather, the company's plan is to it attack the mid-range to low-end market, possibly competing with AMD in the value segment.

Before unpacking the rumor, let's lay out the full rationale for the "NVIDIA goes x86, competes with Intel head-on" idea.

First and foremost among the reasons cited for NVIDIA's alleged plans is the fact that we're about to make another turn on Sutherland's wheel of reincarnation, where graphics functionality will move back onto the CPU die. When this happens, NVIDIA's lucrative integrated graphics processor business is, of course, toast, which has to be one reason why the company went ahead and euthanized it a bit early.

This turn of the wheel is interesting because it's not just that the integrated graphics processors (IGP) will move from the chipset to the CPU, but retain their same basic degree of specialization. Rather, both the integrated GPUs that go onto the CPU die and the more discrete models are essentially becoming many-core, general-purpose processors (albeit specialized for multithreaded throughput and floating-point). This makes the situation even more ominous for NVIDIA, because not only will Intel and AMD take their IGP market from them, but even in the discrete GPU market NVIDIA will also end up with a generalized processor that competes with x86.

The ultimate point is that in both the discrete and integrated GPU markets, NVIDIA is already destined to compete directly with Intel and AMD, which means that an actual x86 product from NVIDIA means only that NVIDIA has decided to fight x86 with x86, as opposed to fighting it with some non-x86 architecture.

What about those Transmeta engineers?

The fact that NVIDIA has hired a bunch of ex-Transmeta guys doesn't necessarily mean anything at all for this supposed x86 processor.

As the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard, with its pervasive use of LLVM, makes clear, just-in-time compilation (JIT) is the way that everyone is going to tackle the many-core problem, at least in the near-term. This is because even when you know at compile-time that your target architecture is x86, you probably don't know the number of x86 cores that users will have available, so you can delay some parts of the compilation process to runtime so that the output precisely fits the target machine's hardware.

If you're already using JIT by default to map code to hardware at runtime, then you can just target non-x86 cores as well, should any be present. This is how Snow Leopard is able to take advantage of GPU hardware alongside multicore x86 for general-purpose computing tasks.

Because the software side of the GPU is already headed towards a heavy reliance on binary translation techniques, it makes sense that NVIDIA is scooping up Transmeta guys regardless of any plans to produce a CPU. So, again, the Transmeta hires don't necessarily augur much of anything.

In fact, the notion that NVIDIA might produce a non-x86 processor but use binary translation to sell it as an x86 competitor appears completely ridiculous. Now, this doesn't mean it won't happen—it just means that if it does, it'll fail miserably and we'll all have a laugh.

As for whether NVIDIA is actually planning an x86 CPU, I have no idea. As I always say when this rumor crops up, the scuttlebutt from journalists who have sources is that NVIDIA is indeed going to bring such a beast to market. I don't have any sources—just a bit of sense—and I think that anyone who jumps into the x86 market at this point is completely nuts, especially if they decide to roll their own instead of buying VIA.