Rumor Says Nvidia To Enter x86 Market

Nvidia looking for some x86 love?

"We believe Nvidia could enter the x86 CPU business," said analyst Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech. "Nvidia could become a supplier of x86 CPUs by necessity to preserve both GPU and chipset revenue."

Ok, so, that much we already knew it could be a good way to go for Nvidia: Intel has locked Nvidia out of it's platforms and will be doing the same for graphics if "Larrabee" ends up being competitive in the long run.
One of the paths Nvidia might take to protect it's business is building something that can go together with in-house built chipsets - nothing really surprising nowadays.

I had already mentioned that Nvidia might want to buy VIA soon, by taking a look at "Pineview" and the Ion 2, which likely won't be going hand in hand like today's Atom does, but EETimes is reporting that Nvidia may very well build the CPU from scratch, by putting to work the engineers it grabbed out of Transmeta. Transmeta has previously built a VLIW processor that could run x86 code by using a translation layer, it was slow and not as power efficient as the company had hoped.
But there's also a pretty good explanation for having engineers that worked at a former CPU company, they have built a new GPU, one that looks a lot like a CPU: Fermi. For me, that is enough to put the Transmeta rumor to sleep. If they had not built "Fermi" this way, this would be an entirely different scenario.

Now consider this: building a new CPU takes time, too much time. So let's take a look at the other option: by grabbing VIA, Nvidia would have access to a fully functional out-of-order x86-64 CPU, one which should also be available in a dual core variant any time now.
VIA, on itself, is way behind the competition right now. While the Nano is a decent CPU, it's too hot for most netbooks and comes paired with a northbridge that's not exactly up to par: the VX855. While it may be good for projects like the OLPC, the VX855 only supports DDR2. Today, that is a big issue. The chipset is already underpowered and memory prices are already the same for DDR2 and DDR3, with a tendency to change to DDR3 becoming cheaper. Which OEM would want a slower southbridge that only takes slower and higer priced memory? Now bring a dual core Nano and the refresh to the GeForce 9400M chipset used in Ion and you've got yourself an interesting piece of mobile hardware, plus a much stronger company behind it.

I don't know about you but I certainly would appreciate to still have Nvidia around for a "couple more" years, while hoping that Intel doesn't end up with the foothold they seem to be aiming at anytime soon. An Intel so big in all fronts would almost certainly mean bad things for everyone but stockholders.
I really don't bite the "HPC and Tegra will save our business" motto that Nvidia has currently adopted - at least not on the short term for Tegra - so this may very well be their only way to keep the company with the same dimension.