- Tuesday, 24 November 2009
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An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support - Fulton Sheen
Nvidia talks up Tegra
THE maker of glorified etch-a-sketch chips, Nvidia has been telling the world plus dog how its new Tegra chip is the bees knees.
Talking to Hexus, Nvidia said that it has spent $600 million on the development of its low-power chipset designed for use in smartphones and smartbooks.
This is about a tenth of the outfit's net worth if you discount the value of the CEO's drinks cabinet. Considering no one has seen a single device containing the chipset there is a lot of money riding on its success.
Mike Rayfield, the general manager of Nvidia's mobile business unit, was appointed four years ago run the Tegra project, and although the first product was announced a year and a half ago he is not miffed that nothing has hit the shops yet.
He said that the cycle between products being announced and getting into the shops is about a year for media players. After these come out then the mobile phones and the netbooks will follow.
Rayfield added that any delay was not really down to Nvidia, but caused by the trials that the different products have to go through before they can be released.
He claimed that Nvidia has about 50 different products that would have the Tegra chip shoved under the bonnet. This includes something Rayfield called a "media pad" which is a 3G-capable touch pad and IP TV.
In the interview he claims that Tegra is better than a chipset using ARM's own graphics designs. µ
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Everyone knows Intel will rule alone this electronics world. Uncompetitive products dubbed rubbish by SpIntel will be crushed with upcoming low power Atom SOC. NVIDIA will be died as expected after Larrabee and this SOC. Too bad they know become an Intel slaves that supposed to fight AMD, and if they are useless, they will be doomed by Intel chips because Tegra is rubbish.
Tegra is actually for all intents and purposes a great chip. From the demos shown it seems to handle hd material great and also have great battery life. Where "Dear leader" get his rubbish remarks from no one knows.
Nvidias problems isnt lack of power, it the avaiblility. You cant buy it from any store... We have heared shedload of remarks about design wins, seen alot of demos... pr pr pr. But still cant find the product in a store near you.
"ARM's own graphics designs"
Yes, that's why most SoCs incorporate Imagination Tech's own graphics designs instead of ARM's. I'm sure NVIDIA's SoC has good graphics and video, but at the cost of die size (I hear it's a very large chip) to keep power consumption down.
Doesn't negate the fact that Tegra is only using ARM11, and thus can't get the extra performance (both per-clock, and higher clocks) that Cortex A8 or A9 provide.
But no one wants to come back to a time where you had to bring spare batteries because they didn't last one day... Battery life will be the major problem of Tegra. If nVidia really sorted that out, wonderful, but I wouldn't bet on that. In fact Mr. Hsung (and his minions) has enough hot air to fill a Zeppelin...
Forget Old Stuff about 16 Core, Fuji Failed again & cutting die Up Into Scrap. heres Bit More from our Invisible Insider:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/170603/hot_chips_to_spotlight_eightcore_server_processors.html
Boring Self Promo fromint.el:
http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_13150009?nclick_check=1
At HOT CHIPS Power 7 with 16 DDR3 Memory Channels & 5 Ghz/s. makes fine reading Here:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219400955
SomeHow everyone Forgot to Mention Nvidia. BTW Nancy Name Actually IS RITA. After ALL.
nathan DRASHEK
Nvidia's Tegra has an Arm 7 and ll. A long with single purpose processors for: 2D rendering, HD Video Encoding, HD Video Decoding, Audio processing and General Imaging. And of course one of it's own GPU's crammed into the chip also, which I believe is the high end from the Geforce 6 series.
By having dedicated processors for all these different tasks, it allows it to vastly drop down watt usage most of the time, by only utilizing the cores it needs for the task at hand.
It's quite a great little chip. Nvidia really has a great product here. If only The Inquirer could get past it's baseless personal vendetta towards Nvidia.
Remember that Qualcomm bought out ATI's mobile phone graphics division and most probably has some its tech embedded in its Snapdragon chip... which seems like a direct competitor to the Tegra...
Note that the Snapdragon contains a Cortex A8 "Scorpion" core, and sometimes two!
We'll have to wait to see how the graphics performance and power usage compare when devices come out with the chips inside.
Also I don't think that Samsung and Marvell will just lay down and let the new boys walk all over them...
Oh, and don't forget that Creative has their Zii ZMS-05 chip with dual ARM5 (ARM926) cores.
It'll be an interesting Q4 2009 / Q1 2010 for pocket sized media devices.
"the value of the CEO's drinks cabinet."
Would you happen to have that number so that I can determine it's relevance.
The Zune HD is going to change the game, here. XNA game development is coming to the masses and the Tegra chipset is going to have a long life because of it. While other chip makers will be making smart phones and cheap 2D only gadgets, the Zune HD and its successors will be powering the next generation of mobile games and applications. And that fruit company will be forgotten about, again. Software is the key, here.
http://n4g.com/industrynews/News-347495.aspx
Quite a number of videos there. 2nd one from the bottom they show it off in small laptops even.
You posted this on the Monday after tens of thousands of people in the US got to play with the Zune HD over the weekend.