I guess its nice, but it sort of seems unimpressive from where I sit. All the other people making A9s just use a 45nm low power process and are able to clock their chips up past 1GHz just fine. NVidia has to use a normal process to get their 4 main cores past 1GHz, and the single A9 they have on LP silicon is clocked way lower. ARM's proposed tandem between A7 and A15 cores seems much more interesting.
What strikes me is that this could compete with current generation game consoles, so next gen consoles might be Tegra "Wayne" (from Wikipedia) :
Processor: quad- or octa-core ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore
Improved 24 (for the quad-core) and 32 to 64 (for the octa-core) GPU cores with support for Directx 11+, OpenGL 4.X, OpenCL 1.X, and Physx
28 nm[23]
About 10 times faster than Tegra 2
Was just hopping in here to post this -- Xbox.next got named (Loop for now) and details leaked about how it is an ARM-based design with dedicated chips for each major process used in modern gaming (video, physics, audio, etc.)[1]
After seeing the specs on the Tegra 3, I can't help but think that Tegra 3++ or "Tegra 4" will basically by the Xbox-next.
I don't think it makes sense to build a flagship (Xbox/PS) console on ARM, since these SoCs are only barely more powerful than the 360/PS3. I would expect a flagship console to have at least the power of an AMD Trinity. Rumors about Xbox.next being cheaper (and thus probably slower) than a cost-reduced 360 also don't make much sense unless MS is going to have two product lines.
>since these SoCs are only barely more powerful than the 360/PS3
The benchmark from NVidia suggested that current gen Tegra can compete with Core2 Intel and XBox360 is slower AFAIK. Tegra.next (next gen ARM, ~2GHz) alike could just be the thing, because a) better hardware architecture allows more efficient algorithms (SM5/OpenCL) b) it would probably allow them to profit on the console instead of making a loss.
This is incredible in terms of helping push the technology envelope further, but I'm afraid it's just going to be used in the short term by Android handset OEMs as another selling point to tout in the spec wars. I wish that they would focus on the end-to-end user experience more, rather than putting their own brand of lipstick on Android and trying to win a pointless spec arms race.
Given that AMD has essentially lost their way as far as being competitive with Intel, I don't view the releases of new mobile products as being pointless processions in an ongoing spec war, but more as a necessity to ramp performance to a point that disruption of the desktop/server space becomes possible. ARM in your phone, tablet, desktop & powering the "cloud" isn't so far fetched. Right now I see ARM & OpenCL/CUDA as much bigger threats to Intel than AMD is.
Can somebody confirm that it doesn't have wireless (GSM, CMDA, LTE, 802.x, etc.) integrated? This would make it different to the Snapdragon, OMAP, A5 etc. system-on-chip
A5 and OMAP don't have 3G/4G integrated in them. A5 uses Qualcomm's 3G chip. Having a 3G chip integrated is more of an exception in the industry, not the rule. Although everyone seems to be moving in that direction right now. Nvidia also bought a company recently to integrate LTE in their chips in the near future.
Qualcomm has an easier time integrating the modems for one simple reason: they make them. Can't think of many other SoC vendors that also make their own modems (maybe Samsung?).
The Tegra 3 is functionally a quad-core processor, but includes a fifth "companion" core. All cores are Cortex-A9s, but the companion core is manufactured with a special low power silicon process. This means it uses less power at low clock rates, but more at higher rates; hence it is limited to 500 MHz. There is also special logic to allow running state to be quickly transferred between the companion core and one of the normal cores. The goal is for a mobile phone or tablet to be able to power down all the normal cores and run on only the companion core, using comparatively little power, during standby mode or when otherwise using little CPU. According to Nvidia, this includes playing music or even video content.
To me this is the interesting feature, not the "more power than before", which was to be expected. Ironically, none of it is presented in the article nor videos.
I also find the "throw more power at it to get it smooth" argument quite appalling.
I hope to see it in Google TV set top boxes, too. Then you can just hook up a gamepad (which Google TV 2.0 supports) and play like on a console. If they can make them for $100-$150, and bring a few more console-like Honeycomb games, it would be a winner. I wish Google would focus more on turning this into a reality sooner rather than later.
