Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang has hinted at the company’s future plans to move even further outside of the graphics card market. The company’s often rumored move to introduce its own Nvidia CPU seems more of a reality than ever.
While it did use gaming to show off the new flagship consumer GPU, the RTX 5090, it’s clear that Nvidia has its sights set on more than Cyberpunk 2077 demos and best graphics card titles. Huang has spoken with investors and analysts, revealing that Nvidia’s CPU ambitions are coming together.
Originally reported by Reuters, Huang said “You know, obviously we have plans.” However, they’re not revealing everything just yet.
At CES, the company announced its Project Digits AI computer, intended for developers in the space. A few weeks before that, it launched a refreshed single-board development kit, the Jetson Orin Nano Super.
Both of these systems feature Arm CPUs, with Project Digits sporting a “Grace CPU”. This is a 20-core Arm chip, which will be embedded in the $3000 AI PC.
It’s co-developed with MediaTek, which is a company that produces a lot of mobile-oriented chips, such as for smartphones, rather than PCs. While the partnership appears to be solid, Huang did say that MediaTek could bring its Arm chips to the market on its own.
“Now they could provide that to us, and they could keep that for themselves and serve the market. And so it was a great win-win.”
It could be some time before Nvidia provides a solid base for gaming on its CPUs. Arm CPUs are coming along rapidly, with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips having recently launched in partnership with Microsoft’s AI laptop push, in devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge AI. Apple’s recent in-house-developed processors have also also knocked it out of the park in terms of performance, even at the lowest level.
However, these chips still have to use emulation and translation layers to get games running. With the vast majority of PC games design to use traditional x86 processors, we’ll have to wait a while before we see a true gaming PC running Arm.
That said, there are areas where Arm-powered gaming PC-type devices are becoming more prevalent. It was recently spotted that Valve was working on an Arm version of its Proton translation layer used in the Steam Deck. This allows Linux devices to play Windows-based games. If Valve is working on an Arm version of that, it could be preparing for the inevitable.
With the future of Nvidia seemingly seeing it latch onto all facets of computing, it should be noted that they didn’t just announce overly expensive hardware. It also announced the $999 RTX 5080 graphics card, as well as the lower tier RTX 5070, which the company claims can perform similarly to a 4090 – if you use their AI-powered tools.