NVIDIA Enters the Mobile CPU Market 97
Vigile writes "NVIDIA just announced the new Tegra line, a complete system architecture on one chip. Built around a licensed x86 ARM 11 CPU, this tiny chip (smaller than a US dime) includes a processor, memory controller, southbridge, and 3D and video processors. The SoC design is meant to give iPhone-type devices a more impressive visual experiences while maintaining idle power consumption under 100 mW. While not a direct competitor to Intel's Atom or VIA's Nano processors, the NVIDIA Tegra will no doubt push the envelope in handhelds and cement NVIDIA's place in the world of computing going forward."
Not x86 (Score:5, Informative)
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid lameness filter.
Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/02/1441214 [slashdot.org]
Like on the Handheld PC (Score:4, Informative)
Please not WinCE (Score:4, Informative)
The only valid reason to design in x86 these days is to run Windows. ARM is lower wattage and cheaper. Once you look at whole systems costs (battery etc) ARM comes out streets ahead. Most OSS can be readily redeployed on ARM. There is even an ARM Ubuntu.
WinCE is a very limited architecture and has no support for SMP etc. It is basically a toy version of Windows.
Re:OoO ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WinCE... (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, with Via making a complete reference design freely available, what could stop someone from making a compatible motherboard that could fit in the place intended for a VIA-based motherboard?
The Eee shows that any processor that can drive a web browser and an e-mail program can be the core of a successful sub-notebook. In NVidia's shoes, I would invest a decent amount of money to make sure Gnash runs fine on it and is as compatible with Flash as compatibility can be.
I would love to see a small sub-notebook with a fast multi-core, multi-threaded, ARM-based CPU, an XO-derived widescreen display, an iPod-class HDD and a battery that could power it all for 24 hours of continued abuse.
And I bet it could be done for peanuts, which means a huge profit margin beyond the wildest dreams of the commodity PC-compatible market.
Of course, I assume someone from Microsoft mentioned casually to someone at NVidia, perhaps during golf, that they could consider dropping some NVidia support on an upcoming Vista service pack if those Linux-running small CPUs start making inroads in the undead XP camp.
More Details Here With Chip Arch (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Don't underestimate ARM. (Score:5, Informative)
Linux being OK implies that x86 is unnecessary.
I don't think so. (Score:5, Informative)
No SMP in sight, not even in the emulator. If you know differently, I'd like to know.
So what's the difference?? (Score:4, Informative)
If you were really keen you could stuff a few extra 1x2inch ARM cards in the box and have a Beowulf cluster in a sub-laptop box.
The sub-notebook is nothing new. I have an old Psion7 (http://newth.net/psion7/index.html) that must be 6 or seven years old now. It was a bit slow, but only had a 100MHz StrongARM CPU. A re-jig with a modern 600MHz+ ARM would fly!
Re:Don't underestimate ARM. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WinCE... (Score:4, Informative)
To support a CPU is not enough. ARM cpu cores will typically connect to an AMBA bus (like hypertransport), but these SoCs will usually have the entire bus internal. You'll have a whole set of peripherals which need to be programmed all over again with little or no code reuse from existing projects. You need to understand how these peripherals interact with the boot rom and CPU in order just to load a bootloader onto it. If you have perfect documentation, you'll still probably need at least a decent oscilloscope or logic analyzer to get a heartbeat out of it. Talk to any firmware or digital design engineer about 'board bring up' on an unproven cpu platform, and you'll likely hear quite a few nasty anecdotes.
All this can be done, but it would save everyone a lot of time if nvidia supports Linux with a real board support package.
Re:Don't underestimate ARM. (Score:2, Informative)
Being open source does mean that the code can be ported, doesn't guarantee it will compile & be stable on all architectures. Even in the kernel non-x86 is generally 1-2 kernel releases behind before new features are properly supported and there's a lot more to an OS than the kernel.
Re:I don't think so. (Score:4, Informative)