[citation][nom]darkchazz[/nom]Reviewers everywhere calling it "powerful" and "screamer", nvidia touting the "console quality gaming" nonsense and people falling for that.QUAD-CORE cpu and 12 COAR!!! gpu became big marketing words for them.I'm ok for 4 cpu cores if there ARE applications that make use of them, but there aren't any at the moment.and you'd think they included a good gpu this time around, but it can't even hold a candle to the 2-core SGX543 in the year+ old ipad2, and even the 4-core mali400 in the Galaxy S3 completely leaves it in the dust.[/citation]
The SGX543 also takes up considerably more die area than the GPU in Tegra 3, even after you normalize the different manufacturing processes (45nm vs 40nm) of the A5 and Tegra 3. Unsurprisingly it also consumes more power at load. Both of these attributes are very important factors of consideration when determining the value of a mobile SOC, given the increasing prevalence of mobile 3D apps, and the fact that a mGPU at load can have a particularly significant impact on battery life. I think power consumption and die area are far more important in the mobile market than the desktop, and unlike the desktop I don't think absolute performance is the primary determination of value for a mobile SOC.
I never really understood the negative 4 core Tegra 3 bandwagon. The processor doesn't consume anymore power under typical load than dual core options. In fact in certain instances it actually consumes less, and when you need the additional performance (albeit at the price of higher power consumption) it's available. With other Cortex A9 SOC's you don't even have that option. I think Nvidia actually did a pretty damn impressive job of maintaining the advantages of both dual and quad core options while greatly minimizing the disadvantages of adding 2 additional cores(primarily power consumption). And sorry, but I don't buy into the argument that you'll never need the additional performance in a mobile device. It just seems ignorant beyond words for anyone who's observed the progression in the tech industry for more than ~5 years to say something like that.
The Tegra 3 is a reasonably priced SOC that offers good competitive performance and reasonable power consumption, especially considering it's ~10 months old now (that's practically a generation in the mobile market). Other options might offer more GPU performance, but as I stated above that comes with tradeoffs that can be far more pronounced than in desktops. And outside the A5, how many SOC's that are currently available in devices on the market have an SGX543 or 544 in them? In other words, how many Android devices use an SGX543 or 544... The last time I checked not many, and no phones, although some were on the horizon. When you look at other SOC's in Android devices the GPU in the Tegra 3 is very performance competitive.
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