Nvidia's Tegra 4 GPU: Doubling Down On Efficiency

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s3anister

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I'm always amazed with the progress made in strides in this ultra-competitive sector so it's nice to see nvidia finally hit 28mm with Tegra 4. I'm sure some of their performance gains can be attributed to this.
 

levin70

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Charlie at semiaccurate is correct. The Tegra 4 is DOA. Almost no one will be using it. Everyone else is already ahead of where the T4 is today, and it hasn't even launched. How many design wins were noted? 1?

Yeah, says it all.
 
[citation][nom]deedee2die4[/nom]Nvidia staying on top, the best of the best![/citation]

Uhh, no... T4 isn't supposed to be out for like six months, yet it's already not as fast as some of Qualcomm's latest. Nvidia is improving, but as usual, they're staying a little behind in technology.
 

aicom

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[citation][nom]levin70[/nom]Charlie at semiaccurate is correct. The Tegra 4 is DOA. Almost no one will be using it. Everyone else is already ahead of where the T4 is today, and it hasn't even launched. How many design wins were noted? 1?Yeah, says it all.[/citation]
Nobody is ahead of Tegra's four Cortex A15 cores. Krait is at less performance than A15 (until the refresh at least). Samsung's got Exynos 5 Octa, but that's not out yet either and T4 will probably still top it in the GPU performance department. Speaking of which, Tegra 4 has the most powerful GPU in floating-point of anyone (including the iPad 4) with 74.8 TFLOPS @ 672 MHz. It only takes a 825 MHz Cortex A15 to match a 1.6 GHz A9, and Tegra 4 is supposed to ship at 1.9 GHz. Unfortunately, TDP does go up in the process.

You also have to look at where these parts are targeted. Krait is really gunning for phone design wins and they have many. It's a very power efficient chip that found its way into some very nice phones. Tegra 4 is not aimed at that market; Tegra 4i is. Tegra 4 will have a much higher TDP than 4i (and Krait) and will get substantially higher performance as a result.
 

tjosborne

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Hey guys, I am considering getting a Asus transformer prime tablet with the tegra 3. Would it be best to wait till this processor ends up in a tablet to get one?
 
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So at 1.3Gpix/s, Nvidia has just admitted to 10x overdraw...per second? So we're looking at 9~10 frames per second oh high res displays. Lag lives on.
 

PreferLinux

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[citation][nom]aicom[/nom]Nobody is ahead of Tegra's four Cortex A15 cores. Krait is at less performance than A15 (until the refresh at least). Samsung's got Exynos 5 Octa, but that's not out yet either and T4 will probably still top it in the GPU performance department. Speaking of which, Tegra 4 has the most powerful GPU in floating-point of anyone (including the iPad 4) with 74.8 TFLOPS @ 672 MHz. It only takes a 825 MHz Cortex A15 to match a 1.6 GHz A9, and Tegra 4 is supposed to ship at 1.9 GHz. Unfortunately, TDP does go up in the process.You also have to look at where these parts are targeted. Krait is really gunning for phone design wins and they have many. It's a very power efficient chip that found its way into some very nice phones. Tegra 4 is not aimed at that market; Tegra 4i is. Tegra 4 will have a much higher TDP than 4i (and Krait) and will get substantially higher performance as a result.[/citation]
You mean Gigaflops, not Teraflops.
 
[citation][nom]aicom[/nom]Nobody is ahead of Tegra's four Cortex A15 cores. Krait is at less performance than A15 (until the refresh at least). Samsung's got Exynos 5 Octa, but that's not out yet either and T4 will probably still top it in the GPU performance department. Speaking of which, Tegra 4 has the most powerful GPU in floating-point of anyone (including the iPad 4) with 74.8 TFLOPS @ 672 MHz. It only takes a 825 MHz Cortex A15 to match a 1.6 GHz A9, and Tegra 4 is supposed to ship at 1.9 GHz. Unfortunately, TDP does go up in the process.You also have to look at where these parts are targeted. Krait is really gunning for phone design wins and they have many. It's a very power efficient chip that found its way into some very nice phones. Tegra 4 is not aimed at that market; Tegra 4i is. Tegra 4 will have a much higher TDP than 4i (and Krait) and will get substantially higher performance as a result.[/citation]

S4 Pro is a faster CPU IIRC. IDK about how the graphics compares and won't comment about it.

Nvidia, like I said, is getting better, but they're still going to be a little behind. They're making up a lot of ground here, especially with how they're making Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i instead of a single SoC to take both places, but they seem like they'l still have a little room to make up, at least in CPU performance, to be the best. Like I said before (at least in other articles about it), they'll still be near the top either way.
 
[citation][nom]ankit0x1[/nom]can this play crysis? ('console port' on arm)[/citation]

Just keep the texture settings low and the resolution at minimum and it might be almost playable if someone manages to get it to work on ARM ;)
 

mayankleoboy1

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[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Uhh, no... T4 isn't supposed to be out for like six months, yet it's already not as fast as some of Qualcomm's latest. Nvidia is improving, but as usual, they're staying a little behind in technology.[/citation]

+1
In this hyper competitive market, every SoC company needs atleast one product that is best in one area over every other SoC. Middling in all the areas is what T3 did, which made it a failure.
 
[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]+1In this hyper competitive market, every SoC company needs atleast one product that is best in one area over every other SoC. Middling in all the areas is what T3 did, which made it a failure.[/citation]

To be fair, although in many ways not an exceptional SoC, T3 was a very successful product, wasn't it? They managed to get Tegra 3 in one form or another around to a lot of well-selling devices.
 

mayankleoboy1

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[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]To be fair, although in many ways not an exceptional SoC, T3 was a very successful product, wasn't it? They managed to get Tegra 3 in one form or another around to a lot of well-selling devices.[/citation]

I would say that T3 came with a bang and lots of fanfair, but as soon as the Krait4 came, nobody wanted to be seen with a T3.
After that T3 pretty quickly started appearing in the Tier2 phones. All T1 phones used either a KraitS4 or the Exynos4. I would even say that Ms's Surface was a semi-fail in performance because of the T3. If MS had went with a dual core KraitS4, i am pretty sure Surface would have received much better reviews.
 
[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]I would say that T3 came with a bang and lots of fanfair, but as soon as the Krait4 came, nobody wanted to be seen with a T3.After that T3 pretty quickly started appearing in the Tier2 phones. All T1 phones used either a KraitS4 or the Exynos4. I would even say that Ms's Surface was a semi-fail in performance because of the T3. If MS had went with a dual core KraitS4, i am pretty sure Surface would have received much better reviews.[/citation]

+1 I can agree with that :)
 

mayankleoboy1

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As Nvidia is not a market leader in SoC's, they cant do anything revolutionary in the T4 SoC . Like increasing the die area for adding more GPU muscle. Because they dont know if the OEM's will accept that or not. So whatever they do, it will always be conservative.
Apple and Samsung have no such problem. THey can afford be revolutionary, without much consequences.
 

mayankleoboy1

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Krait S4 is a modified A9 architecture, that performs between A9 and A15 archs, but closer to A9.
Apples Swift architecture is also a modified architecture that performs between A9 and A15, but much closer to the A15 arch.
 




If we're going by the links in the above post, Krait is much closer to A15 than to A9. This is still ignoring the fact that those types of measurements are extremely general and oftentimes only loosely related to performance in the real world.

My bad, it's the newer top Snapdragon 800 version that Tegra 4 doesn't beat in CPU performance, thanks for the clarification. Regardless, I seem to have given Nvidia too little credit with Tegra 4.
 
8 years to have same tech as far cry 1 on a tablet... thats great but playing it might be hard on a tablet....
I think ill still be using my PC for gaming, lets see when tablets are actually interesting for me.
 
not so much from discrete gpu this year but the it is interesting year for mobile gpu war....maybe :)

http://www.itproportal.com/2013/02/25/mwc-2013-nvidia-tegra-4-benchmark-reveals-competition-crushing-processor/
 
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