Hooray for the US court system! Its always the golden rule - he who has the gold makes the rules
I wish I had me some gold, have some rules I'd like to make...
I learned that rule
years ago. Still applies today!
I'm assuming when Nvidia entered that agreement, it decided as a matter of business that its best course ahead was in the ARM world and not in x86.
Can we be certain of that? Writing off x86 entirely does not seem like a great idea, especially not back in 2004 when the future value of the ARM market would have been much murkier than it is today. If anything, it would make the most sense to leave open as many doors as possible for whatever ISA would prove to be the most valuable for their processors.
Methinks Nvidia did what was least likely to get them sued into oblivion by Intel.
Meh, it was an out of court settlement, NVidia agreed to those terms- they weren't imposed by a court.
Well yes, that's how agreements work. Consider the leverage Intel had against Nvidia in "encouraging" them to accept such an agreement.
Nvidia obviously didn't want protracted entanglements over patents, among other things. The agreement was their path of least resistance.
But that doesn't stop others from writing an emulator. NVidia could sell the hardware to manufacturers who then write the x86 emulator for the CPU to run.
Maybe. Does Nvidia have a track record of allowing third parties to hack their hardware?
Tying this discussion back to the topic: Denver is a fairly good looking CPU. If any other companies look at it and say "gee, I'd like that in <insertdevicehere> but I need support for a different ISA", then maybe they can strike a deal with Nvidia to allow said parties to muck with the microcode in Denver (and/or successors) to get it to run a different ISA. But, as has been stated in this thread, Nvidia isn't going to do that on their own if that ISA happens to be x86.
Don't get me wrong: I love windows but Windows 8.1 has strengths and weaknesses. Android also has weaknesses. I'd never use android on a desktop. So this goes back to NV creating SOCs for mobile touch driven devices. Where does x86 fit into this? Being that Windows 8.1 sucks as a touch driven mobile platform, i'd say NV is fine in this respect.
Android can (and does) run on x86 devices. If some wingnut developers started releasing a bunch of apps with native x86 code that makes said apps slow/non-functional on ARM-equipped Android devices (which is the vast majority of them), then all sorts of acrimony could ensue depending on the popularity/desirability of said apps. Android has version fragmentation issues already; native code threatens hardware fragmentation if/when x86 gets a decent number of design wins in the Android world since there are already plenty of Android apps out there with code that won't run at full speed on x86 devices. Throw in some x86-native apps to line up against the ARM-native apps, and you've got a full-on platform-within-a-platform war for Android. What fun!
Nvidia has a chip in Denver that could handle both ARM and x86 native code under Android without a hiccup.