Nvidia gave us an impressive demonstration of their next-gen Tegra platform yesterday. More 3D power, more HD video decoding power and two more CPU cores. The press release highlighted better CPU performance when measured against a 2Gz Dual Core Intel CPU and a 3x GPU performance increase over Tegra 2.
We had a demonstration of some of the key features and that is shown in the video below. 3D performance is impressive. Video decoding performance is very impressive. A 1440p stream of around 50Mbps was shown. On CPU performance, Nvidia only demonstrated the use of four cores in a browser rendering scenario under Android 2.x.
Here’s an image of the Coremark result. Interestingly it shows Tegra 2 at 1Ghz running at about 50% of the Core2Duo but remember, this T7200 was a part from early 2006. For comparison, a dual-core N550 would score about halfway between the Tegra 2 and the T7200.
The major question is, what’s the TDP? Clearly adding cores, adds more transistors and the power requirements of the cores go up. On the flipside, you can get things done quicker and return to idle and low-power state but the key indicator is that Nvidia think it will be OK for tablets and smartphones. Whether it appears at 1Ghz in smartphones is unknown but it puts it in the sub 4W max TDP category (for the Tegra platform) for tablets, that’s for sure.
Most of the Tegra customers are looking at Android solutions and with Ka-El going into prodution in August, tablet products should be close behind. Expect smartphones to take a few months longer.
