NVIDIA Announces Tegra 4: 72 GPU Cores, 4G LTE
Graphics Guru's NVIDIA have announced announced the Tegra 4 chip, a quad core Cortex A15 chip packed with 72 GPU cores, expected to launch later this year. Alongside the chip, NVIDIA also introduced the Icera i500 soft modem. The i500 soft modem is a programmable baseband chip and unlike traditional baseband chips, it is much smaller. The four ARM Cortex A15 CPU cores run at a clock speed of up to 1.9 GHz. The 28nm GPU has 72 shader cores.
Tegra 3 the current SoC from NVIDIA used in mobile phones has 12 shader cores. Now meet the product under codename Wayne .. at CES the Tegra 4 was .
Tegra 4 (codename Wayne) will be a quad-core Cortex-A15 (with a fifth, low-power companion core), with a 72-core GPU — six times more than Tegra 3.The Tegra 4 SoC would get a six-fold of graphics processing power compared to the current generation, 72 Shader processors. It doesn't stop there though. Tegra 4 will apparently be capable of outputting 1080p @ 120Hz, full hardware encode/decode for video up to 2560×1440 (1440p), and a maximum output resolution of 3820×2160 (4K).
The GPU is assisted by a four core Cortex A15 processor and an additional small energy efficient core based on Cortex A7. Interesting stuff, the chip is to be made on a 28nm HPL process and should hit the market Q2 this year.
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- Tegra 4 is built on TSMC's 28nm HPm process (low power 28nm with High-K + Metal Gate)
Just confirmed that our initial information was incorrect, it's 28nm HPL (28nm low power with high-k + metal gates). The difference between HPL and HPM is a optimization for leakage vs. peak performance. This helps explain the 1.9GHz max frequency for the A15s in Tegra 4.
- The fifth/companion core is also a Cortex A15, but synthesized to run at lower frequencies/voltages/power. This isn't the same G in and island of LP process that was Tegra 2/3.
- The fifth/companion core isn't visible to the OS, it's not big.LITTLE but it'll work similarly to how Tegra 3 worked. This probably means no companion core in Windows RT.
- The four Cortex A15s will run at up to 1.9GHz.
- NEW: die size is around 80mm^2, slightly bigger than Tegra 3 but on a much higher density process
- NEW: the shaders aren't unified, the majority are 20-bit pixel shader cores though. No idea on the ratio yet.
- dual-channel memory interface, LP-DDR3 is supported
- NVIDIA's i500 will launch with LTE UE Category 3 (100Mbps downlink) support, eventually we'll see an update to UE Category 4 (150Mbps downlink).
- i500 will launch with carrier aggregation for WCDMA, no idea what 3GPP release.
Shield
- As far as Shield goes, I wanted to correct one thing about how the PC display streaming works. The PC will stream to the display directly, not through Shield. Shield will pass controller commands to the PC.
- Shield will launch in Q2 at a price competitive with other mobile gaming systems and tablets.
- All of the games during the Shield demo were 720p, except for one which was 1080p.
- Miracast is supported, but something better will come later.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6550/more-details-on-nvidias-tegra-4-i500-5th-core-is-a15-28nm-hpm-ue-category-3-lte
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If they can pull it off along with good power consumption, I'm sold.
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Shield
- As far as Shield goes, I wanted to correct one thing about how the PC display streaming works. The PC will stream to the display directly, not through Shield. Shield will pass controller commands to the PC.
- Shield will launch in Q2 at a price competitive with other mobile gaming systems and tablets.
- All of the games during the Shield demo were 720p, except for one which was 1080p.
- Miracast is supported, but something better will come later.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6550/more-details-on-nvidias-tegra-4-i500-5th-core-is-a15-28nm-hpm-ue-category-3-lte
Official link from NVIDIA
http://shield.nvidia.com/
Would like to see one in action before making up my mind, but looks like it could be ok
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- The fifth/companion core isn't visible to the OS, it's not big.LITTLE but it'll work similarly to how Tegra 3 worked. This probably means no companion core in Windows RT.
- dual-channel memory interface, LP-DDR3 is supported
Android doesn't see the companion core either, never did. It's all managed by the processor itself. Not sure why Windows RT was specified.
Dual channel memory, finally someone at NVIDIA got the smacking they needed and made the chip worthy again. Tegra 2 and 3 sucked because they relied on single channel memory interfaces.
deltatux
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That, and hey took OUYA lunch money by making the best controller ever
ohh... and ANDROID handheld console
NVIDIA's Project SHIELD is Disruptive to Game Consoles and Portable Game Devices
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