Looks like competition will be heating up in the CPU market in the not-so-distant future, a sector that is largely dominated by Intel and AMD. Graphics behemoth NVIDIA just lifted the lid on “Project Denver,” an initiative aimed at build high-performance CPU cores based on the ARM architecture.

NVIDIA says the offerings are “designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers.” What’s more, is that Microsoft just announced that the next version of Windows — tentatively known as Windows 8 — will boast native support for ARM.

“At today’s announcement, Microsoft demonstrated the next version of Windows running on new SoC platforms from Intel running on x86 architecture and from NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments on ARM architecture,” noted Microsoft in a press release.

NVIDIA did not give an indication as to when Project Denver will be ready for prime time. Either way, with Microsoft’s full backing, expect to hear more on this over the coming months.

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