Nvidia Confirms Quad-core Tegra 3 Plans
Nvidia has confirmed that its Tegra 3 mobile platform will include a quad-core option.
While firm details are still not available, Nvidia's general manager of mobile business, Michael Rayfield, is quoted in a recent interview on Hexus saying that a Tegra 3 chip will be making an appearance very soon.
According to the site, the new Tegra will pack four processing cores into its design, potentially making it the first tablet-orientated quad-core chip to hit the market as a commercially available product.
The announcement of a quad-core Tegra 3 comes hot on the heels of Nvidia's announcement of Project Denver; a Tegra equivalent for the desktop and server market, which combines a general-purpose ARM-based CPU with a GeForce-class GPU in a single product.
Sadly, though, Nvidia is playing its Tegra 3 cards extremely close to its chest. While a quad-core design is confirmed, the company is being hazy on a firm release schedule.
We can speculate, however. Given that the Tegra 2 platform was launched at last year's Consumer Electronics Show, but Tegra 3 didn't make an appearance at this year's event, it seems likely that the company is planning to unveil the chip at the Mobile World Congress expo net month.
With the tablet market expected to explode in 2011, thanks largely to the launch of Google's Android 3.0 'Honeycomb' mobile platform and the enhancements it brings for large-format devices, Nvidia could well be on to a winner with a quad-core chip - providing it can keep the power draw to a minimum.
Would a quad-core CPU would convince you to buy a tablet, or is Nvidia on a hiding to nothing with Tegra 3? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyTegra 2 has taken a while to get to market, mostly because nvidia was not a proven supplier in this market, so lots of product testing was required before retail products were released, also becuase they ideally wanted android 3 and this was delayed.
There are a large number of big brand names releasing tegra 2 based products into their product ranges (from smartphones to tablets) so I predict that Tegra 2 will be a integral part of the tablet market come Q4 2011 - Andriod 3 should allow this product to do more than is currently available using the older 2.2 platform.
Again the continual growth of multi core (3 or more) hardware now expands in the mobile market. With this hardware becoming mainstream for all platforms - my hope is that more and more developers can embrace this technology and take full advantage of all the cores, from the OS upwards - roll on 64bit only products too (although mainstream 64bit software is just a pipedream for now I feel) :)
Summary - this is great news and I will watch the progress of the ARM based desktop hardware (and associate software delveopment) with great interest.
This reminded me of that Armstrong and Miller royal correspondent sketch..
'We can of course speculate. It may be that Nvidia are including one of their new GF110-based GPUs, but they could also use the GF104 or the GF100 or even some of the older G80-based architecture that we all knew and loved for many, many years. It's quite likely they could be releasing this new product by the end of the year in October, November, December or maybe even earlier in August or September. It could also be that they delay the release until 2012 and instead release it in January, February, March, April, May, June or even the month in which the olympic games will start, that is, July.'
"So from that, we'd be very surprised if NVIDIA doesn't launch Tegra 3 at Mobile World Congress next month. Unfortunately we couldn't get any other gory details such as CPU cores (four, hopefully) and manufacturing process (28nm, we expect), but we expect to have them within a month."
Given that Nvidia aren't scheduled to launch a 28nm GPU until Autumn, I cant see how they would squeeze in 4 cores using 40nm Fabs, and achieve good power consumption, this means that we probably wont see quad-cores until early 2012.
Add to the mix the issues Nvidia had with their 40nm process and Fermi, and considering how sensitive phone manufactures are to power consumption, it would be silly for them to rush Tegra 3, only for power and yield issues to scare off potential buyers.
It looks like the CPU arms race will bring too much power to smartphones by 2012!!. Once a device has a dual-core 1.5+ GHz chip, that runs 1080P flash smoothly it will be powerful enough for 99.9 % of the public, just like a Q6600 still seems fast to most people. At this rate people will be able to fold on their phone's GPU at PS3 levels before long:D
It'll take some good power management to stop these chips sucking the life out of batteries. That's an issue smartphones already have, the fact they need charging every day.