"Project Boulder," a new, secretive project at Nvidia, has reportedly just been revealed by "sources in the know," and it's said to be the chip maker's "claim to fame" in the world of servers.
According to a source speaking with Bright Side of the News, Project Boulder is a new ARM-based, multiple core system on a chip (SoC) for use in servers.
Nvidia's Boulder SoC reportedly throws efficiency and lower power consumption out the window, instead going for ultra-high performance at whatever the cost.
The Boulder project could result in an eight to 16 core SoC that, according to one source, would compete directly with AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors in the server space.
Project Boulder's high performance
Nvidia's Project Boulder will reportedly take the form of a high-power consumption, high-performance SoC by the time 2014 arrives.
It's expected to deliver a high-bandwidth interconnect and feature high-bandwidth memory akin to DDR4.
As one source points out, Nvidia recently partnered with Utah-based Fusion-io for an ultra-fast (think 1.5GB per second) super-solid state drive called ioFX, and that tech might play a part in Project Boulder as well.
Though given the super-SSD's significant price tag, the memory tech may be slightly toned down for the average consumer in Project Boulder.
Awaiting Nvidia's word
The original report from Bright Side of News includes little sourcing, so news of Project Boulder could ultimately prove anything but true.
TechRadar has reached out to Nvidia to see if it has anything to add, but a representative replied that the Santa Clara, Calif. company doesn't comment on rumors.
Maybe we should be relieved - Project Boulder could be the type of secret project that'd require Nvidia to kill us after it tells us about it.
