Nvidia’s Tegra 3 debuted earlier this month in a flurry of impressive figures related to its power consumption, performance, and GPU capabilities. The new quad-core chip is a significant leap forward compared to Tegra 2, and it’s already achieved notable design wins, including a front-and-center position at the heart of Asus’ upcoming Transformer Prime.
A report from DigiTimes (quoting unnamed industry sources, natch), claims that while notebook/tablet vendors are interested in Tegra, they’re strongly considering platforms based on chips by Qualcomm or Texas Instruments. The former’s Snapdragon S4 has already been adopted for use in HTC’s Jetstream and Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1, and there are reportedly another 30 tablets in development that’ll use the Snapdragon solution.
Here’s how the two stack up. Tegra 3 is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore that runs at up to 1.3GH . It’s built on a 40nm process and includes a 12-core GPU. The A9 itself supports out-of-order execution and ARM’s NEON SIMD instruction set and supports a single 32-bit LP DDR memory channel (albeit at speeds of up to 1500MH ).
The Snapdragon S4 is a 28nm dual-core chip clocked at 1.5-1.7GH and uses the Adreno 225 GPU. The “Krait” CPU at the heart of the S4 is wider than the Cortex-A9 and decodes three instructions per clock cycle rather two. Qualcomm claims that the Adreno 225 GPU is 50 percent faster than the Adreno 220 — but the latter’s performance was nothing to write home about.
Nvidia’s greatest challenge with Tegra 3 will be convincing developers to write apps and games that take advantage of all four cores. The LG Optimus was the first dual-core smartphone, and it isn’t even a year old. The first dual-core tablet, the Viewsonic G-Tablet, only shipped a year ago. While it’s true that dual-core chips are now the norm across smartphones and tablets alike, software developers have little reason to specifically target quad-core products.
The Snapdragon S4′s CPU should be at least moderately more efficient than the Cortex-A9 clock-for-clock, while building it on 28nm likely gives Qualcomm a power consumption advantage over Tegra 3′s 40nm technology. Tegra 3 will likely outperform its competition in fully threaded workloads, and it’s a definite advance over Tegra 2, but NV may have trouble long-term if dual-core solutions prove a better real-world fit for device workloads.
Taiwanese tableteers tease Tegra, snap up Snapdragon
0 comments:
Post a Comment