It looks like Tegra is looking to put serious pressure on the competition in 6 months. With the advent of Kal-El (Tegra 3), Nvidia is going to be pumping out what they claim is 5 times the performance of the existing Tegra 2.

I don't know if that is computational performance or graphical performance or both, but this will be a fast processor. At 5x graphical performance, it will tidily wipe the floor with even the mighty SGX543MP. I don't know if NVidia is late to the party, or early, but one things certain, if they keep up this pacing with sub-1 year release cycles, they will be about a generation ahead of the competition, and releasing roughly at the same time.

Here's a video of it outputting an insane 1440p video from an Android tablet (likely a development machine)!
http://www.jkkmobile.com/2011/02/nvi...t-demo-at.html

Expect aggressive companies to jump on this Tegra bandwagon and start delivering these devices this year. I've never been so happy that PC manufacturers are spilling over into this space, as they can be highly aggressive with release schedules.

So in 6 months, you can safely leave your heavy laptop at home, as ultra-light tablets will be quite able to do the same work, with impressive battery life, and low power sleeping to boot.

Here's a lovely PDF brochure for the Exynos 4210 featuring the Mali 400MP.
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...Exynos4210.pdf

It's pretty light on info, and doesn't mention anything about the Mali 400. One interesting point of mention is that the product sheet claims that the Exynos 4210 is capable of displaying a mind-melting 3200M pixels per second ! This is the highest count I've seen yet, and it may be due to the number of cores implemented.

What to do with all of these pixels? It is written that the Exynos 4210 can drive a full 1080p screen in addition to two WVGA (800x480) displays, or two 1080p screens for stereo 3D (as seen in a presentation). That is incredibly impressive for a mobile processor.

It also reveals that it implements the ARM Neon instructions, and is worthy noting that it supports DDR3 memory (6,400MB/s)!

Anyone know how many Mali 400 cores are in the Exynos 4210?

This guy seems to know what he's talking about
http://odroid.foros-phpbb.com/t599-e...ail-400mp#3030

Here are a few promo videos about the upcoming ARM Cortex A15. These processors mark the crossover point where ARM chips start to invade on the performance characteristics of Intel chips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF0ALmcCiLA

It was quoted in this video that a cortex A15 running at half the frequency of an ATOM processor, would out perform it! Quite impressive, though it was vague and didn't include core count.

Expect these chips in 2013.

Here are some OEM discussions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmopvGpcMAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Eo84Uia0Y

The next generation of SoC memory is upon us. The process has now shrunk to a shockingly tiny 30nm!

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/25/s...ing-2gb-mobil/

These Samsung LPDDR2 chips reduce the footprint of of older 40nm chips and reduce the power requirement by 25%. Faster, smaller, power efficient-ier.

Well we are at the ARM Cortex A9 stage trying to get over the Cortex A8-era. I don't think quadcore A9's will be much of an upgrade/improvement over the dualcore A9's. I say this with confidence because I've noticed how long it took to drive the market to develop applications that target two cores (Windows).

With Quadcores, the push for more power was much less as dualcores were elegantly supplying as much horses as you really needed. Today if you were to benchmark a few applications that target quadcores and compare it on quadcore vs dualcore. You will notice you won't be getting double the performance although you are using double the power.

What will be important is RAM, hard drives (NAND/SSD), motherboard (yes even on ARM) and the gpu architecture. I think by the time ARM Cortex A15 (Eagle) hits they should have made several advances. So yes- with A15 performance may be quadruple that of Cortex A9, if the market allows. Remember, you are only as fast as your slowest component -- these words cannot be truer today.

What I'm interested in is seeing what software will take advantage of such workhorses. Obviously Apple, HP and RIM will use their proprietary software but what about the other guys? MS has shown a very poor effort in this power struggle with their WP7 development. Android is also very poor (my S5PC110 functions slower than A4) but is steadily increasing (more will be revealed when/if 3.0AOSP released) in this field. MeeGo was best set to take advantage of this (if they launched along side with wp7 on e7-sexy hardware, they would've built up a large ecosystem that would rival the big guys when A15 would've become available). Since that overdue foetus was aborted we really have a lack of options, unless Windows Next (aka Windows 8) is a real suprise!

s/memory/power/ - these chips don't require memory, they are memory.

Hahaha.. Thanks for the correction. Yes, you're absolutely right!

It seems that Imagination Technologies has released new drivers for the SGX540, which seem to produce a significant boost in graphics performance.

According to Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4238/c...y-tab-10-1-8-9

Wow.. Benchmarks for the dual-core Qualcomm MSM8660 @ 1.5GHz ft. Adreno 220 GPU are in !
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4243/d...220-benchmarks


The test unit:


Some results:



Uh, wow. These framerates are truly impressive for a handheld device.

A sign of things to come? No doubt. Get ready for some insane performance this year.