There have been some big developments in the CPU world over at CES 2011 in Las Vegas.

Firstly there have been a number of Intel Sandy Bridge second generation Core i powered machines launched from the likes of Lenovo, MSI, Dell and Acer.

And then AMD announced the arrival of its new Fusion APUs (Accelerated Processing Units); a new class of combined CPU/GPU processors.

But perhaps the biggest development was Nvidia coming clean with its Project Denver aims.

Project Denver is Nvidia's codename for getting ARM-based chips into bigger machines, like PCs and servers - an area currently dominated by Intel and also AMD with x86 architecture.

ARM-based chips are produced by Nvidia, and also the likes of Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Sharp and Samsung, and can be found in many mobile devices including phones and tablets.

Nvidia has scored the rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture and licensed ARM's current Cortex A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra mobile processors.

"ARM is the fastest-growing CPU architecture in history," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia.

"This marks the beginning of the Internet Everywhere era, where every device provides instant access to the Internet, using advanced CPU cores and rich operating systems. 

"ARM's pervasiveness and open business model make it the perfect architecture for this new era. With Project Denver, we are designing a high-performing ARM CPU core in combination with our massively parallel GPU cores to create a new class of processor."

Microsoft also recently announced that Windows 8 would support ARM architecture (as well as traditional x86 platforms too).

Exciting times in the CPU world then, it will be interesting to see how it all pans out in the end.