The discrete GPU market is in free-fall, with Intel's offering looming on the horizon. Nvidia is having a hard time selling its core logic chipsets into either AMD or Intel CPU-based designs, with yesterday's Apple news being a rare good-news exception for the company. And Nvidia seemingly still hasn't found a customer for its Tegra ARM-plus-multimedia SoC for handhelds. Yet, with the exception of one notable layoff last September, the company has maintained its large and well-compensated workforce. What are all those engineers slaving away on?

I've long suspected that Nvidia's been brewing an x86 CPU, as have others, and yesterday the company addressed the suspicions in a roundabout way, courtesy of senior VP of investor relations and communications Michael Hara's comments at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco:

"I think some time down the road it makes sense to take the same level of integration that we’ve done with Tegra... Tegra is by any definition a complete computer on a chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power, very small, but highly efficient. So in that particular state it made a lot of sense to take that approach, and someday it’s going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well... If you look at the high-end of the PC market I think it’s going to stay fairly discrete, because that seems to be the best of all worlds... A highly integrated system-on-chip is going to make sense in the MID and netbook markets... Two or three years down the road I think it’s going to make sense... We won’t talk much more about what we think about that timeframe, but there’s no question it’s on our minds."

You can read the entire article at EDN.