Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Check this out:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/24/n...ness-teased-b/
Nvidias Tegra 3 with be quadcore 1.5ghz!

Will Nokia go in that direction any time soon?!
Imagine a quadcore n900 successor!

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors by the fall!!
 

[QUOTE=madmaze;927485]Will Nokia go in that direction any time soon?![quote]

No. Tegra is simply too powerful for now for a mobile phone, and it consumes more power than for example a dual-core 1.2Ghz one from TI. In 2-5 years a Tegra might find its way in mobile phones, just not yet.

What would you use all that crunch for? I doubt you can find too many useful scenarios for such.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

I am sure there are plenty of things to do with a processor like that.

I understand that that this processor is more thought for tablet, but atleast dualcore would be nice, I believe its Motorola that already had a dualcore phone, though it is not a tegra

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Come up with some useful scenarions then?

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

I hope the Tegra 3 doesn't have errata in certain important registers like the Tegra 2 does ;)

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

A dualcore would suffice for any phone right now. But I also don't think that a quad core Cortex A9 would be too power hungry. By dynamically disabling cores that aren't needed on low-level usage, it shouldn't use any more power than a single core. Enabling them on the other hand, when more CPU resources are needed, allows a task to complete faster and therefore sending the CPU into deep sleep much earlier - which as you may know uses no power on this architecture.

Besides the CPU wouldn't have to work at the maximum speed when distributing tasks on more cores, thus enabling the CPU to use less power when running multiple cores at low voltage and low clock, than running just 1 core with maximum clock and voltage.

But it's true that the maximum power consumption CAN be four times that of a single core, when all four cores run at maximum clock and voltage. That means that if you are watching a HD movie, playing Quake and compressing a .zip archive at the same time, it will drain the battery much faster. BUT you wouldn't be able to do all of this on a single core anyway and it won't happen to often that somebody uses his phone that way ;).

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

They can power on/off the processors on demand, can't they?

This way, quad cpu when tethered/docked and single/dual for mobile. As needed, or whatever. I'm sure they can make sellable features out of these. Not just a spec bump.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Elaborate AR system
Meda transcoding (DLNA, AirPlay types)
Apps with A/V cognitive features (OCR, etc)
Games
3D modeling
Video editing

(Most of the above already exist in some fashion on iOS & Android)

The key here is that these systems are on a "race to idle". The longer they're hung up on a process, the more subsystems are likely tied up and draining the power; not just the CPU.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

That would indeed sound a lot better idea, but preferably the device would just include HDMI-output and would enable "docked-mode" when it's plugged in to a suitable HDMI-device and a charger. I'd hate to have to use a vendor-specific dock every single time.

Though, I still can't really think of any useful scenarios for using all 4 cores except games. Perhaps development on-the-go, but even that would be a much better task to do on a normal desktop PC.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Quad Core on mobile phone will be great.
First dual core processor then full HD video and now Quad cores are coming.2011 will be a remarkable year of mobile technology.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

isn't it a case of if you build it, they will come:)

Imagine the speed of all those simulators would run at... one might even have to inject a few loops to slow them down!

cheers,

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Yep, exactly :)
A developer should always be thinking of "what more can I do, given I have access to more resources..."

Nah, there are plenty of a/v treatments/filters that can be added to the chain to improve the aesthetics... and a p2p multiplayer layer... cheats, hacks... and even more powerful systems to emulate.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

:p I am still thinking about my dosbox/emulator is running too fast:D

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Glad to see you guys are enjoying my site. :)

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Was going to start a new thread but found this one...

http://www.noticeorange.com/StoryBod...ww&font_size=9

Quad core demo'd, I notice there is a very low power 5th core that does most of the work, the others come online as required. Very elegant! There is also a 12-core GPU !!

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Exciting times, but NVIDIA's mobile GPUs suck terribly in performance and efficiency terms compared to both ARM's own Mali & Imagination Technologies' PowerVR.

They may be first out of the gate with a quad-core, but there'll be ones with way more powerful GPUs and no doubt more elegant CPU-portion designs soon. Plus, in their rush to get this out it'll be on 40nm ... the ones coming out in Q1 & Q2 next year from other companies will be 28nm and actually consume significantly less juice (even at peak load) than today's dual cores.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Honestly, I don't see any reason for being excited. Just give me more RAM and miniHDMI out on N900, and I'm happy penguin ;)

Yea, I can imagine HDMI output @ 1080p could use powerful DSP/GPU, but quad cores of CPU? Hm, maybe dosbox emulating some powerful machine to play SystemShock (1) smoothly... Not many more useful things, I suspect.

Of course, bloatware industry will - probably - benefit from that. Which is of none interest to me, even less anything to be happy about.

/Estel

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

Nah, dosbox (and of course anything that runs inside it) is single threaded. Seriously, 4 cores on a mobile device, with software written the way it is today, is completely superfluous. Even on my workstation most cores are idle unless I'm compiling.

Those tegra3s might make a nice build farm for some ARM distro or other though.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

I am running some FE analysis under DOSBOX, it's already taken almost a week to get to 850 secs of simulated time. I guess that will do ya ;)

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

I personally can't wait to see ARM's next-gen big.LITTLE computing.
Basically a (28nm) 1GHz Cortex A7 that runs when the system is in idle. When on-demand, (28nm) Dual-Core A15 Eagles clocked at 1.5GHz are activated.

With 1GB of DDR3 RAM, 64GB NAND, a decent gpu, dsp and other modules... it should bring mobile performance on-par with last-gen's personal computers (Intel SU7300).

Which means on low-power mode it should give similar performance to something like an OMAP3630 but with 30% less battery drain. And on high-performance it should consume about the same amount as a regular 1GHz Dual-Cortex A9 (like Tegra2) but offer a large performance boost (estimated about 7-fold).

Now if a beast like that had real software (Linux-base, bug-free with proper GUI like Kde/Qt) then it should rival even today's ultraportables.

Re: Quad Core Mobile processors this fall!! Nvidia Tegra3
 

3 of the 4 cores on my desktop lie idle most of the time, too, even in multithreaded apps. But that's not the fault of the CPUs, but rather, the dev tool and code suppliers. When industry finally understands that apps need to be multiPROCESSOR aware, and not just multithreaded, we'll see some advances... even in mobile.

I dream of a multicore tablet running high-demand music production software...