Intel is a company that almost exclusive designs computer processors. They pour billions of dollars in to this industry, and have been creating silicon microprocessors since the 70s.

In the last 5 years, they have made very few advances in technology. Overall from Sandy Bridge(2010) to Haswell-Refresh(2014) they would have paid billions of dollars into R&D, and what progress have they made?

At the same frequencies, a 4590(3.3GHz, Haswell-Ref.) gets what, 20% better performance and 15% lower power draw than the older 2500K(3.3GHz, Sandy Bridge).

AMD, their main competitor, has been a player in the CPU games since the 90s, and can still only bite at the heels of Intel in single-threaded performance.

Now, excusing the issue of NVIDIA acquiring licenses from both Intel and NVIDIA for technology licenses, do you honestly believe that at this point any old company can jump in to the fray and release a competitive desktop processor against these companies who have decades of research and experience behind their backs?

If Intel and AMD can hardly improve on their own CPUs, I highly doubt NVIDIA really would have anything new to bring to the table in terms of processing power.

Even if the chips did function well, would it be financially worth it? People have been working happily with Intel and AMD processors for years, and let's be honest, CPU bottlenecking is an issue a whole lot less of the time than actual GPU performance is. What could they really do that would warrant enough customers to buy their new motherboard, sockets and processors even just to break even, when most of the desktop market isn't in demand of a new CPU brand.