nVidia Preview 'Tegra' MID Platform

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...

[Kokuyo]

But seriously, this sounds interesting. If they actually manage to pull it off, this might actually make TV on the go a real possibility (compared to strain your neck trying to watch Sex and the City on your phone...).

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.

Worth waiting for...

[LinuxGeek]

I almost bought an Asus EEE pc this weekend, this is worth waiting to see how it is implemented in consumer devices. Give me a small laptop type that can run linux and I'll buy one or two. Heck, 30 or 40 hours would be enough battery time, don't need 100.

Re:Imagine a Beowulf-Cluster...

[YourMotherCalled]

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.

There are two options:

1. A giant battery that you wear on your back.
2. A regular sized battery because the marketing goons aren't talking about running an entire device, just the nVidia portion of it. When you add all the other functions (WiFi, cellular, screen backlight, etc.) the runtime will drop dramatically.

Stick that in the next...

[saha]

iPhone 3.0. Actually the current iPhone uses Power VR MBX and the new one is rumored to be using the Power VR SGX graphics. The Power VR VXD video IP core can supposedly "supports 1080p H.264 Main/High Profile decoding, as well as VC-1 and a variety of other standards" http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/638 [beyond3d.com] http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/30/apples_bionic_arm_to_muscle_advanced_gaming_graphics_into_iphones.html [appleinsider.com]

Re:Sounds like the same advertising from the EEE..

[Svartalf]

Patience...

Pandora [openpandora.org] comes...and it is looking like it's going to largely deliver on the "promises" it makes.

Re:Yer! ARM laptop

[zeromorph]

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:Yer! ARM laptop

[Scootin159]

Interesting that they say it has 'enough graphics power to render Quake 3 @ 40fps'... does Quake 3 actually run on any non win/x86 platform?

Re:Vista

[neokushan]

Vista doesn't have an ARM version, you'll have to stick with Windows mobile for now.
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.

Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS

[frovingslosh]

enough graphics power to render Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS

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 started and get into the game before the other players all have multiple frags ahead of you?". And perhaps the most important question is "at what resolution?". Talking about playing a game anti-aliased at 40FPS but not saying what resolution you are playing at is completely meaningless. While this hardware may be able to 1080p HiDef video, there is an awful good chance that that lame benchmark "spec" is based on a much lower resolution.

I sure hope that this doesn't lead to further hype and dumbing down of video specs. Look for new graphic chips that can run Wolfenstein at 1692 fps or Pong at 31500 fps anti-aliased.

Re:Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS

[eebra82]

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.

You are missing the point. It's not as much about how fast it can run Quake 3, but rather that it is capable of doing so reasonably well. You cannot compare it to modern graphics engines simply because this is a processor that promises to deliver reasonable performance at incredibly low voltages.

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.

PowerVR vs. nVidia

[DrYak]

The PowerVR vs. nVidia comparison is approximately the same as the ARM vs. Intel Atom.

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 appliances.

Smart Phone will probably use whatever is less power hungry and go for PowerVR's designs.

Re:Sounds like the same advertising from the EEE..

[AnyoneEB]

Except Pandora promises at best a third the battery life. Then again, Pandora is due out very soon, and reading about both it sounds like Pandora is the type of machine nVidia would expect Tegra to be used in.

Re:PowerVR vs. nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

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). A "classical" architecture with agressive Z culling will beat the pants off a tiler (and CSAA drops the multisampling bandwidth down into the noise). I'm not sure where you think they're getting away with less transistors for a tiler either, there's a whole binning engine (and the associated bandwidth) which a classical architecture doesn't have.

Re:Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS

[Bert64]

A networkable quake3 that you can play over wifi with random people on the train would be fun.
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.