nVidia Preview 'Tegra' MID Platform 117
wild_berry writes "nVidia have previewed their Mobile Internet Device platform which will be officially unveiled at Computex in the next few days. The platform features CPU's named Tegra paired with nVidia chipset and graphics technology. Tegra is a system-on-a-chip featuring an ARM 11 core and nVidia's graphics technologies permitting 1080p HiDef television decode and OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics. Engadget's page has more details, such as the low expected price ($199-249), huge battery life (up to 130 hours audio/30 hours HD video) and enough graphics power to render Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS."
Imagine a Beowulf-Cluster... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now the only question is, how heavy is the battery to allow for such a long lasting device. You can't tell me it actually is this efficient, if it boasts that kind of computational power.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I hate it when that happens. Not that those are the two things I hate most in the world or anything.
Re:Imagine a Beowulf-Cluster... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Close the lid. Does your computer last twice as long? No. I suggest before you shout your mouth off you attempt to gain some grounding in the topic. For starters, try:
watch -n1 cat
With an absolute mizer of a cpu, a Crusoe 800, I go from 850ma to 550ma from the display. The reason the backlight is a 50% power hit is because the cpu is sucking almost nothing in the first place.
With LED backlighting or OLED the effect would be less pronounced.
The reason you dont notice mov
Re: (Score:2)
Your numbers don't match up with mine, sounds like you're shooting from the hip.
I was at least polite enough to speak in very general terms and use qualifiers.
Re:Media player. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is about a new processor for mobile devices. Asking if it supports ogg is like asking if your ethernet cable supports MP3.
Re:Media player. (Score:4, Funny)
How can I tell if it supports mp3? I looked at the printing on the side of the cable and didn't see anything about mp3? Does that mean I can't download mp3s with this cable? Where can I get an mp3 ethernet cable?
(Sorry, been spending too much time over at AVS Forum, where questions like this are asked daily and in all earnestness.)
Re:Media player. (Score:5, Funny)
Normal price, $100 per foot. But I have a 50% discount for AVS Forum posters. And special this month I'll throw in an ethernet cable impedance tester to tell you when you need to replace your cables due to oxidation.
Re: (Score:2)
What's funny is reading the posts of some of those richer-than-FSM types that frequent there. Other people instantly defer to them on subjects it's clear they know very little about. I mean, since they can afford to spend way too much money on a hobby, they clearly have intimate knowledge of the tech behind it, right? : p I'm not saying I'm an A/V genius (though I also don't try to present myself as one), but I can easily spot someone who's just rehashing the made up BS
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
If my name wasn't a giveaway, I'm from New Zealand (NZ).
Re: (Score:2)
Will that work with nuclear as well as hydro-powered oxidation? I've heard that oxidation from nuclear power is much drier than hydro power, so rust doesn't form as easily, but oxidation happens twice as fast.
Also, is there a website, or maybe a newsletter somewhere, that will tell me what kind of power I get at home? My address is: 513 Maple St.
Thanks!
Re: (Score:1)
Will that work with nuclear as well as hydro-powered oxidation? I've heard that oxidation from nuclear power is much drier than hydro power, so rust doesn't form as easily, but oxidation happens twice as fast.
Thanks!
Holy shit. I love the idea of selling audiophiles electricity from the right sort of power station.
You know, back when I was young and foolish I'd hear about engineering projects where customers had asked for all sorts of strange features. And I'd explain at nauseam to anyone who'd listen how those features were pointless and messed up the original design. But now I just regard that sort of thing as a business opportunity. I mean, I like hacking stuff to do things it wasn't orginally meant to do. And I get
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Besides, it was a suggestion, not a requirement. If you want to use something else, just knock yourself out- it IS an open system, you know.
Yer! ARM laptop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yer! ARM laptop (Score:4, Insightful)
The people who expect to be able to buy software to run on hardware that they also bought -- they might care -- just a little bit -- I would imagine.
Re:Yer! ARM laptop (Score:4, Insightful)
Most smart phones don't use WindowsXP "I don't know of any that use an X86" and people do buy software for those.
If used a good Linux distro and then provided repositories than you would have your software.
A software package system that worked like iTunes would be an Ideal system.
Provide lost of free and pay software from an easy to use online store and you would have a great business model. Steam shows that it already works for games.
It should work just fine for this as well.
Of course this chipset could also be the heart of a new iPhone/iPod Touch as well.
Re:Yer! ARM laptop (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a difference (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
That one hell of a Freudian slip
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yer! ARM laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, looks like a new round in the CISC (now represented by Intel Atom) vs. RISC (now represented by Tegra) flame war. Ars Teechnica had an interesting article [arstechnica.com] about the new relevance of the differences of the two architectures two weeks ago.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yer! ARM laptop (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Worth waiting for... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
pretty silly (Score:2)
nVidia would be pretty silly to build this thing and not to provide a proper driver for the only OS it'll probably work under. Of course, if this thing takes off, Microsoft probably will come out with a 'mini XP for ARM-based cheap portables'. But nVidia's got to feed the Linux chicken in order to lay that particular egg...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Worth waiting for... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Closed :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Over half the slashdotters here maybe?
Open source of course allows for more flexibility as well as a review for vulnerabilities.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
None of them seemed that eager to repeat the experiment. Admittedly, the consensus was that : 1. it had gotten quite a bit better and 2. it still didn't work properly.
YMMV though I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, aside from possibly Android, I won't be changing away from WinMo any time in the forseeable future, if ever.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like the same advertising from the EEE... (Score:2)
... and now nVidia is going to do the same thing to me.
Re:Sounds like the same advertising from the EEE.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Pandora [openpandora.org] comes...and it is looking like it's going to largely deliver on the "promises" it makes.
Re:Sounds like the same advertising from the EEE.. (Score:4, Interesting)
ffdshow or VLC at 1080p? (Score:2)
Nope, it's nVidia we talking about (Score:2)
If it can run ffdshow or VLC at 1080p then we're talking something special.
Read again. The chip is made by nVidia. You can pretty much be sure that the decoding capability will be handled in BLOB.
At best, maybe they'll put some hooks in ffmpeg's library (or directly in VLC as an alternate engine) to call their BLOB to handle the accelerated decoding.
At worst you'll have to use a binary only nVidia-specific player. And given that the ARM+nVidia platform isn't going to be very popular fact, probably not a lot people are going to reverse engineer it (ala "Nouveau" project) - expect
Vista (Score:2)
Re:Vista (Score:5, Informative)
Atom is x86 based (I think) whereas this is ARM-based. Vista isn't even ARM compatible.
Re:Vista (Score:4, Interesting)
However, TFA states (that's right, I actually read it) that nVidia is open to running other platforms, not just windows CE, so if enough interest is generated, they MIGHT actually have Linux running on it.
It's a chipset, though, not a device or anything so ultimately it would be up to the mobile manufacturers to decide what happens, providing nVidia has support for it.
Re: (Score:2)
Thus, even if more windows software had source code, you still couldn't recompile most of it to run. It's only windows by name.
As phones become more powerful, they are more than capable of running software that would have run on a desktop system just a few years ago... And just look at how much has been ported to the iphone, so qui
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
A large amount of .NET programs will "just run" on Windows CE.
And an absurdly large number won't. To be frank, I'm wondering just which programs you're referring to, because damn near nothing runs on my ARM-based WindowsCE-running device without *major* tweaking (read that as "practically rewritten from the ground up"). Yeah, yeah, anecdotal whatsis, but my current office project is porting some old code to WinCE, via Visual Studio 2008. It's absolutely amazing how many things *aren't* supported "out of the box" under the .NET Compact Framework. Menus, for instance.
Re:Vista (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
But Will It Run Linux? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Stick that in the next... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
PowerVR vs. nVidia (Score:3, Interesting)
nVidia are producing classical graphic cores.
PowerVR are employing specific techniques (Tile-Based Deferred rendering) which enable them to cram the same performance using a lot less transistors and running at lower clocks.
The nVidia SoC is probably more targeted toward sub-notebooks, big multimedia PDAs (As a example, the TapWave Zodiac was based on an ARM and an ATI Imageon running PalmOS 5) and small internet-enabled ap
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
...on a phone.... (Score:2)
Smart Phone will probably use whatever is less power hungry and go for PowerVR's designs.
Tile-based architectures start running into instruction-fetch issues for long shaders on complex scenes (shaders can be kilobytes each, and each tile has to fetch all of the shaders that end up visible in that tile).
Excuse me ? On a *PHONE* ?
:
I'm pretty much sure that you can't play Crysis on a Tiler, unless you make the tiler so much over-complicated that it looses its advantage over classical architecture...
BUT, common, I'm speaking about *SmartPhone*. Nobody's going to play Crysis or anything that has more than a couple of kilobytes worth of shader code on a 320x240 resolution that fits in you pocket.
Besides, this kind of situation isn't very likely to happen any way because
- Even on the desktop you won't encounte
Re:...on a phone.... (Score:4, Insightful)
nvidia and amd and every consumer electronics company in the world are doing their damnedest to break that status quo and make your phone and everything else a capable all purpose platform. this nvidia chip can go in mobile phones, but its got a video engine capable of 1680x1050. why is that? because ~~***YOUR PHONE***~~ needs that display? good god no. the point is, we're seeing new embedded devices we expect to function in dual roles of a) phone and b) computer replacement.
long shaders let you do tasks like indirection in ways unfathomable for simpler setups. this in turn lets you run more application code in gpgpu land. this lets you save power. even if you disavow the use of it, i fail to understand how anyone could claim the lack of the feature is a good thing. it requires more advanced caching / buffering, but that should not be a dealbreaker. especially when we start loading our chips with massive onboard caches -- a secret well loved by the gamecube for example.
Definition problem (Score:2)
. the point is, we're seeing new embedded devices we expect to function in dual roles of a) phone and b) computer replacement.
Then we simply have a definition problem, because those all-encompassing device that are currently emerging is what I tend to file under the categories of sub-notebooks and beefied-up PDAs.
I which case, we actually both agree, given that a couple of posts ago I mentioned that this new chip will be perfect for sub-notebooks and PDA. This even makes more sense if the later is coupled with one of those laser-based embed projector. The the hidef resolution will definitely make sense.
even if you disavow the use of it, i fail to understand how anyone could claim the lack of the feature is a good thing.
I'm not saying that it's a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A typical shader architecture can be viewed as a VLIW processor with an interpolator, texture unit, ALU and data store. Each "instruction" for all those units takes something like 512b, or about 64 bytes. 1KB is only ~16 i
Quake 3 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like an interesting toy, but aren't we twisting the measurements a bit here? Quake 3 came out in 1999. Any modern graphic chip has the graphics power to render Q4 at much faster than 40 FPS. Of course, there's the important question of "do you have the computing power behind the graphics power to make the game playable without lag or stutter on anything but a non-trivial map?", as is "do you have the system resources to get a new map sta
Re:Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the resolution, I agree that it's rather strange that they left out the details on this, but we can assume that it's going to be something like 640x400, which is still very impressive.
Re:Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Infact, a phone with enough power to play good multiplayer games, wifi, the ability to auto detect other devices within range, and most importantly the ability to remote boot games from other users (so you dont need to rely on finding people with the same games) would be awesome...
Just imagine the commute to work, and finding random other people on the train to play games with.
ability to remote boot games (Score:2)
In a perfect world this might be interesting. In the real world, if you build such a platform, I can assure you that some script kiddy is going to play games with your system that you will not like.
Ob (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I wish I had mod points, I don't care if it's an AC.
I need a new keyboard, and a towel for my monitor.
More details (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37729/135 [tgdaily.com]
The APX 2500 is far more interesting to me than the 600/650. Qualcomm and Broadcom better watch their backs.
wow, that raises the bar a bit. (Score:2)
Hopefully, a phone. And, hopefully it won't cost $400.
really, a smart phone with that chipset should only cost about $200.
with 1080p tv/video and gaming.
Stationary But With Linux Drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
So what I need is some Tegra PCs with minimal HW (maybe a DVD/Blu-Ray player, but no floppy, modem, or really even a HD - just 8GB Flash and PXE boot) that's mainly LAN and HDMI/DVI connections, running Linux, and full-featured Linux drivers. Preferably open-source drivers that we can tweak to work right, but which get full performance from the HW.
Or... (Score:4, Insightful)