Kevin Spiess - Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | 12:16PM (PT)
NVIDIA looking to offer a viable alternative to Intel's Atom
It might not be all that long from now before you can buy a phone, Pocket PC / PDA, portable media player, or another variety of mobile device, that is powered by NVIDIA's new Tegra processor.
Unveiled today, the Tegra is based on NVIDIA's earlier APX 2500 processor -- a non-x86, ARM11 processor fused with a GeForce-derived graphics core. The initial two models of Tegra -- the 600 and 650 -- are aimed at portable, visual devices. Last week, NVIDIA was showing one such possible upcoming Tegra-powered device: a portable video player, that was around the same size as an iPhone. Taking full advantage of the graphics processing ability supplied by Tegra, the small video player was capable of decoding 720p high-def quality video to a HDTV at 30 frames per second. (1080p video encoding/decoding was also possible, but at only 24 FPS.)
Where Intel's Atom may have more general number-crunching CPU horsepower, the Tegra relies on the natural strength of NVIDIA: graphics processing. The Tegra chips will have a lot of GPU / GeForce DNA in them, so they'll be natural pixel-pushers, capable of shader effects, anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering, high quality graphics, and very responsive applications of visual computing (such as, for instance, powering graphics-intense menu systems, such as the one found currently on the iPhone.) Last week, a member of the Tegra team told me they had Quake III up and running on Tegra-powered device, running at around 30 FPS -- which is impressive, for a chip that is about the size of your fingernail (144 mm square.)
Being so small, the Tegra 600 and 650 also maximize power efficiency. These initial Tegra chips, amazingly, only require around 2 Watts of power for operation. In practical terms, this means that your Tegra-powered media player device could feasibly carry many gigabytes of DVD quality video around, and could play your horrible video collection back to you for more than 15 hours straight.
The first Tegra processors will make an appearance in late 2008. I expect that many interesting utilizations of Tegra will come up -- possibly in new devices with combinations of features not yet imagined, such as gaming-friendly phones.
With this release, it looks like the entire direction of NVIDIA has shifted a few degrees. To prevent stagnation, it is always a good idea to diversify; and with Tegra's release, it seems that NVIDIA's plans over the last few years to apply their technological wealth in bold new directions, is only now just beginning to manifest.
The future gets more interesting all the time. With AMD's Fusion under development, NVIDIA moving mobile with Tegra, and Intel developing a graphics solution (called Larabee), the face of these three giants could be remarkably different, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.
Below: A video of Tegra in action, taken today (presumably) in Taipei. Poor video quality -- but gives you an idea of the graphics processing power of this zippy, mite-sized chip. Current Tegra devices run using a version of WinCE with turbo-charged graphics.
Hmm... I'd love to see exactly what AMD Fusion is going to be capable of... God that's going to be sweet. A GPU mixed with a CPU, huh? That's going to be a lot of processing power.
199-249... Hmm.. portable devices are becoming as expensive as some consoles 0.0. Does that mean that most portable devices have more expensive parts, or are companies jipping us?
I also gotta say that Nvidia has been very busy this year. I really do like all of the progress they have made. Now the only thing now is to let software catch up with them lol.
Let's see... we need a better OS (I'm sticking with XP until Microsoft comes out with something better than the horrible Vista), probably better drivers for all of the stuff Nvidia is pumping out, and also cheaper hardware, except that's already being achieved because all of the high end technology that is coming out just makes everything else beneath it cheaper. Combined with the AMD Fusion thing, the future looks very nice for the PC.
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The Tegra chip is a good bloody piece of technology. Portable devices have had shitty graphical quality for awhile. We needed something like this.
Initial video players with this chip could be going for 199 or 249 round abouts. But release is still a ways away.
199-249... Hmm.. portable devices are becoming as expensive as some consoles 0.0. Does that mean that most portable devices have more expensive parts, or are companies jipping us?