There have been a lot of rumours in the last few months about Nvidia developing its own CPU, although nothing official has come to light just yet. But a recent Nvidia announcement hints that the processor market really could be hotting up over the next few years, irrespective of whether AMD manages to get back to its former glory.

In the announcement, Nvidia has brokered a deal with VIA to produce chipsets for a new low-cost platform incorporating VIA’s forthcoming Isaiah processor. At the beginning of the year, the VIA Isaiah made the news, for promising to double or even quadruple the performance of existing VIA C7 processors, whilst still keeping the power requirement low.

What Nvidia will bring to the party is of course its capable integrated graphics chipsets.

The hope is to produce a platform which has comparable (or even better) CPU performance than an Intel Celeron, with significantly more powerful GPU capability than any Intel integrated chipset can muster. And all for $40 (£20), allegedly.

One of the rumours about Nvidia’s CPU intentions involved Nvidia buying VIA, to get hold of the x86 licence held by the Centaur processor division. Clearly, although those talks haven’t come to fruition just yet (apparently due to VIA quoting too high a price), they have borne other fruit.

Why does Nvidia need a CPU?

Looking at things purely from today’s point of view, Nvidia is still doing well. It just about has the high ground with its GPUs (although ATI’s next generation is imminent), and its latest chipsets have finally added support for DDR3 memory. So you don’t need to sacrifice the option of SLI anymore, by choosing an Intel chipset, if you want the latest memory support.

But in the long term, Nvidia will be facing Intel’s Larrabee, and the prospect of graphics moving over to ray-traced rendering on a heavily multi-core CPU. So Nvidia really does need to be in the CPU business sooner or later.

The VIA announcement clearly isn’t about Nvidia actually producing its own CPU. But it does put Nvidia more directly in competition with Intel. Although their chipsets have been fighting in the same market for years, there has been as much synergy as combat on the platform front.

But single-manufacturer platforms are increasingly becoming the focus of attention. AMD can now supply you a complete package of CPU, graphics and chipset. When Larrabee arrives, Intel will be able to do the same thing. That will leave Nvidia out in the cold.

Splitting the Intel Atom

The new Isaiah-based platform is currently being compared to the Celeron, although Intel’s Atom will be a more likely foe. With the success of the iPhone, and the increasing focus on even cheaper PCs, this is clearly an area of potential growth.

Virtually everyone has a computer nowadays who wants one, apart from those on extremely low incomes. So the question is how to sell computers to the poor, and how to get those of us who already have powerful desktops and notebooks to purchase yet more computing devices – either handheld or secondary ones in every room of the house.

Low-cost platforms are the answer to this, and Nvidia wants a piece of the pie.

The VIA announcement could also be a step towards a new platform alliance in the years to come. So will we be seeing ‘nVIAdia’ in the near future? The financial issues remain unresolved, so a merger remains questionable. But it certainly looks like Isaiah could be heralding a second coming for Nvidia.