Nvidia's Tegra 4 GPU: Doubling Down On Efficiency

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gondor

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[citation][nom]tjosborne[/nom]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?[/citation]

There is always something "just behind the corner" ... the next best thing. Are you going to wait with your purchase forever because of that ? If a product fulfills your needs, then go for it. If it doesn't and it's merely a gimmick, then sleep over it.
 

somebodyspecial

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What data do you have to show it's slower than qualcomm's latest? They should be ahead in everything with T4, cpu and gpu when released.

Adreno 320 is FAR weaker than the gpu in T4. The A330 should be beat as well as it's just an uplocked 320. It will take the 800 model to beat it (600 won't cut it either) and neither of those are out.

T4 won't be beat until AFTER it's released. Shortly after, but after and probably too late (again) for enemies to get into xmas crap in volumes makers will want (qualcomm whined about this last time...LOL ceo stated nv only got to devices because they release first...yeah that's the point). This is why they won some stuff last time. Weaker AFTER but first to the devices to meet manufacturer's schedules. You have to be shipping product in July to get into xmas. IF you have anything different than below (we now know more about 4i which I didn't have much on below, no data then) please post. Below is basically why I think they will have a lot of success with tegra4 (more since 4i goes into cheap phones too). Of course, Anand didn't respond. For those who want financials it's in the link the post came from. It's quite a bit longer than below.

REPOSTED from my anandtech post - It covers most of the new chips coming I think and the makers:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6746/tegra-4-shipment-date-still-q2-2013
Global android tablets Q4 were 29.6 mil units (and tegra3 didn't get a ton of that unit #).
Global android phones Q4 were 160mil units. They now have a shot at 5-6x more market than tegra3 had access too as phones were basically a no go. Not so now with phones and it's much easier to prove compatibility when you own the modem tech on the soc. I'd call this a battle now vs. qcom (or sammy) where last time it was more of a david/goliath (no modem and tegra3+@1.7 with better watts didn't show up until a little to late to get into anything in decent numbers). This is a much more even contest this time. Wisely NV went 6x on the gpu instead of 4x which would have ended like the exynos5 in the nexus 10 (too little to really game on at that res). Samsung went octa cpu (I think? in GS4 or at least later) leaving them supposedly with double power on the gpu via T658 (if a few days ago rumors are true, or maybe you guys are right and it's power vr 544mp3 from Brian Klug's article a month ago? or maybe it's a 5440 that's a quad with X gpu...LOL). I'd really be surprised if this gets the presumed double over T604 without really draining the battery life when taxed. I'm still trying to figure out which rumor is true with the gs4. There are so many...ROFL. If 544mp3 it's weaker than T4 I suspect no matter what you do, only T658 would be interesting here. This isn't counting whatever ipad5/iphone6 hits with (and I only gave android sales numbers, not considering any sales gained on apple's stuff-for ease of comparing here - though apple's share price etc shows maybe I should consider apple sales as available). Adrendo320 can't catch ipad3 (let alone the A6) and is only ~2.3x faster than Tegra3 (not t3+ @1.7 which you didn't bench). So Tegra4 should pretty much bury Adreno320 in everything until they replace it. The gpu and games will be the most important thing this year, as gaming ramps up the graphics on mobile. So the winner here is whoever is the fastest in july or so shipping for revenue to get in all the xmas devices. The Qcom snapdragon 600 seems to just be an up-clocked adreno 320 so I don't think that catches T4 either especially when you consider NV has a pretty solid lead IMHO in game enhancements for Tegra as the list of great looking games for tegrazone this year is growing. I'm sure others can adapt some games, but how long will people wait to get the same thing for their chips? NV is heavily concentrating on the gaming (always has as a gpu company).

The snapdragon 800 is more interesting with the adreno 330 (will this make it into volume before xmas to get into those devices?). The a320 (on nexus4) is pushing 1/2 the res of nexus 10 (mali604) and still scores about 1/2 of nexus 10. So 330 claiming 1.75x compute vs. A320 doesn't seem like a huge threat to Mali604 let alone Tegra4 or T658. Wild card being no opengl3.0/cuda/dx11 (if info is correct here) but that only becomes useful when used in games (and T5 will surely change this). As for apps I don't think anyone will be using socs for REAL work any time soon either. Tegra4 optimizations should mitigate a lot of that anyway IMHO (until 3.0/dx11 is really needed - most dx11 effects surely would drop fps to a crawl in any soc today or this year). This is basically the same as saying NV 660TI cards lack bandwidth when you have to run a game at a res that causes <30fps min (on amd or nv) to show it (2560x1440+ etc). According to steam (and monitors on newegg) so few of us are running there it's pretty dumb to design memory bandwidth for above 1920x1200 on ~$300 cards (probably even $400, which still hit below 30fps often). People running above that have TWO CARDS according to steam's survey (even then it was only a ~2.5% market last I checked)!

Not sure we know enough yet to comment on rogue (power vr s6) really yet, but it's another wild card I guess (no doubt it should be good). I just don't think they'll be lasting long with bigger players now in the same race (takeover target? That would change things substantially). This is a company that only has ~$100mil revenues in the last 6 months and 10-20mil profits in that time. Hmm...With Arm/Qcom/NV/Samsung/Intel all in with billions in the bank it's a tough road like AMD's. I left out Intel because I really don't think they're in this until 22nm atom or 14nm (next year's atom/soc broadwell? whatever - 22nm expected atom by end 2013 but that's not in this running then for xmas toys) and it remains to be seen if they can actually get decent graphics made by themselves & with good drivers (which to date, they've failed every time). IMG.L meanwhile had to borrow 22mil just to cover a 100mil bid for MIPS crap. This amount would be a joke to all 5 companies mentioned here. This kind of shows being in business with apple (at least for some) doesn't make you much money eh? They overpaid for it too, which shows fear I think. This sounds like ATI/AMD deal, but on a FAR smaller scale...LOL. Chip sales up 90% but they couldn't even make 30mil? Short term they are a great chip, long term vs. the 5 mentioned R&D will kill them IMHO. The big players drove them out of PC's years ago, and I think they'll be driving them from mobile now that its the next important toy so to speak :)
 

somebodyspecial

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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.

No it can do 10x what they figure is needed for the targeted devices (4i- cheap phones). Thus, any more is totally wasted dev time correct?

"A 1080p phone with just over two million pixels, refreshing at 60 Hz, needs fewer than 125 million pixels per second. Tegra 4i gives you enough fill horsepower for more than 10x overdraw, filling every pixel on the screen. Hence, Nvidia thinks it effectively balanced resources given the platform it’s targeting with Tegra 4i."

If you only need 125mil but you can do 1300, you are completely in OVERKILL as far as they are concerned. Understand? I can't believe the haters in here. Who uprated this post?...LOL. Simple math, this isn't calculus.
 

somebodyspecial

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Incorrect, no modem made it a failure. Questions about compatibility until proven (you don't own the modem, does it really work with X modem?) also cost them. People take the simple route, already proven.

This is not the case this time since they bought icera. I don't think you need to be the best either. You need to have a good product, yes, but more importantly you need to be OUT and available (in enough volume) to meet a manufacturer's given scheduled time frame for their product debut. If you can't meet volumes they want you're kicked out no matter what. This is #1, perf is #2 (which includes watts, performance, cost etc). You don't get to #2 without passing the #1 hurdle.
 

somebodyspecial

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Not sure I agree with why surface failed...They should have chosen T3+ @1.7ghz. Same power envelope and more perf. MS chose to cash in and shave a few $$. Likely less than $5/unit but it adds up over 2-4million. HTC onex+ has some far better benchmarks than T3. An extra 400mhz makes a difference all around. People don't realize this because most of the benchmarking was done on T3~1.3ghz, not T3+ @1.7, which admittedly was a little too late. This shouldn't be the case with T4.

More on what T4 beats (QCOM 600 in here):
http://www.phonearena.com/news/NVIDIA-Tegra-4-beats-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-600-in-benchmark-tests_id40160

It beat everything but A6 which isn't included so not sure what it does in that regard yet. But it only has to get close to be very good in a tablet at FAR less cost probably and maybe a bit better battery wise. Apple will of course answer but at what price?

Also helping them this time, they made a ref phone (great idea to show what you can do as Intel has done with medfield). A dev could just copy it slap their name on it and be done with development for the most part.
 
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T4 GPU's floating point are mainly 24bit while competitors do full 32bit. Comparing the FLOPS between a crippled 24bit fpu with a full feature 32bit fpu borderlines cheating.
 

Marcus52

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[citation][nom]tjosborne[/nom]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?[/citation]

I would wait. Not only is the SoC market, regardless of manufacturer, putting out significantly more powerful chips in 6 months or so, the Intel Haswell mobile chips are coming. While they aren't SoCs per se, and will draw too much power to compete in the phone market, they will be used in some higher-end tablets (I imagine the Surface will get upgraded, and you can bet other manufacturers will jump on Haswell ASAP). The performance of a Haswell equipped tablet will blow away any SoC made in the next couple of years (and then we'll have Broadwell).

I wouldn't fault anyone for getting a tablet/ultrabook now, I mean, if you keep waiting for the next thing you'll never buy anything lol, but for my money buying toward the year's end makes a lot more sense.
 

somebodyspecial

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http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2415809,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fpcmag%2Fbreakingnews+%28PCMag.com+Breaking+News%29

Crushed the Qualcomm 600 according to pc magazine.
http://www.qualcomm.com/snapdragon/processors/800-600-400-200/specs
We'll have to wait for 800 chip to catch Tegra4 even then it looks like it will be close, but if tegra4 comes first, it will get into xmas devices. I never expected the 600's A320 to catch tegra4 anyway (nor the cpu Krait 300). The benchmarks show this. Krait 400 is in the Snapdragon 800 with Adrena 330 though. Tight race ahead.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Qualcomm-CMO-disses-NVIDIA-we-clean-Tegra-4s-clock_id39515
Clearly the ceo thinks a little too much of their 600...LOL.
"Nvidia just launched their Tegra 4, not sure when those will be in the market on a commercial basis, but we believe our Snapdragon 600 outperforms Nvidia’s Tegra 4."
Nope sorry dude. Your 600 got crushed in 2 benchmarks so far (antutu and browsermark (edited, my mistake had geekbench first)). We'll have to wait for more.
"So, we clean Tegra 4′s clock. There’s nothing in Tegra 4 that we looked at and that looks interesting. Tegra 4 frankly, looks a lot like what we already have in S4 Pro..."

He needs to recheck their chip I think. Or stop believing and start PROVING their chip is better. PC mag noted neither them nor samsung (octa) has let them run their benchmarks THEMSELVES. NV let them do it freely. So nvidia is not afraid I guess?
"The first hint we've seen of Qualcomm's new generation comes in some benchmarks done on the HTC One, which uses Qualcomm's new 1.7-GHz Snapdragon 600 chipset - not the 800, but the next notch down. The Tegra 4 still destroys it."

PC mag seems to think Tegra4 is pretty fast. Destroy is a strong word correct?
http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2012/10/early-ipad-4th-generation-benchmarks/
Ipad4 scored 1757, tegra4 scored 4148. That score makes sense considering it's 100mhz faster than iphone5 which was 1640 at pcmag. Ipad5 will probably be out by the time t4 hits a tablet or phone but it looks like this chip isn't bad. I hope someone starts benchmarking REAL games soon. Tired of synthetics (glbench, egypt etc). Judging the rest though, it blew away iphone5 in everything (a little over double in GLbench Egypt HD offscreen and nearly 2.5x geekbench). Also note in browsermark even the onex+ (tegra3+ 1.7) nearly catches Snapdragon 600. Also you see Tegra4 more than doubles onex+ tegra3+ @1.7ghz. So it's fairly fast at least in some stuff.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1496541
More phones tested on Antutu. Not sure how V3.01 affects scores though.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6472/ipad-4-late-2012-review/4
ipad 4 scored 47 in egypt offscreen. So loses to T4 at 57. The T4 looks good in cpu and gpu so far. It will be interesting to see what apple does to balance power vs. battery this next time. I'm sure it will be 28nm though so that should give them some room to bump things up.

Intel won't excite me until broadwell/14nm stuff comes. But Marcus52 is correct on waiting to xmas or near there. I want to see S800, Exynos octa or their next version, T4 and hopefully Rogue6 by then. But leaning T4 tablet 10.1 just for tegrazone games that are coming or out (hope this is in the next nexus 10 re2 or whatever they call it). They seem to try to get more stuff optimized for their chips and plays into me trying to cut out console purchase this time via Shield+700 series NV. Though I reserve the right to go AMD if they put a great card out by the end of year. But its hard to get around PC/TV games on shield from anywhere in the house.
 

TheinsanegamerN

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why all the hate for the tegra 3? ive got one in my nexus 7, and it performs admirably (though battery life is an issue). cant wait for tegra 4, though hopefully some oems will produce tablets without 1080p displays so we can actually enjoy the gpu power (i seem to be the only person who is fine with 1280x800 res)
 

hannibal

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Tekra 4i is the more interesting part in here. It should be reasonable in power usage... Have to see the performance first, but power usage is very important in portable devices.
 
@somebodyspecial

I don't feel the need to say anything other than look at my last post and then there's no need to argue over T4/T4i ;)

Also, it doesn't matter what form or process node we look at T3 in, it still wasn't really impressive against Krait competition and a few others. Yes, the die-shrinks and such improved it a lot, but they still didn't completely fix it and besides that, it would have probably been more expensive than you seem to think to use the latest die-shrink of it. It's still a large SoC and it's on a process technology that is in much more limited supply than there is demand for it.
 

somebodyspecial

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Are we arguing? ;) I think your last post regarding snapdragon said 800 would beat T4... :) Grey really isn't in that ballgame as it's for $200 phones. I'm not sure what you mean by T3 being on a process node that has no demand. It's 28nm now. Same as krait quad. I fully believe Krait quad is larger now if not before the shrink of T3+. I think the first device was HTC OneX+ (oct) and Droid DNA came only one month later (nov). It remains to be seen how many designs T3+ gets into before T4 ships in June. I still can't believe Surface didn't use this over T3. I would have delayed the product if needed, performance is so dramatically different. 1.3ghz vs 1.7ghz + an extra 20% gpu clock is big (520vs416 I think it was so over 20%). If it hadn't performed so mediocre I think they would have gotten far better press and sales.

I can't find a die size for Snapdragon S4pro. Tegra3 is ~80mm (as is T4, T3+ is smaller). Why would it be more expensive to use a chip that produces less heat, better battery (see below) at less size? Exynos 5 (32nm) is ~96mm. It's difficult to find any die sizes for Snapdragons (strange?). Also note T3 is well over a year old and it took krait 8 months to beat it :) And if you're a gamer T3 still isn't a bad choice as noted it Tom's article in Jan:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-tegra-android,3371-9.html
1/4 of their games crashed on Nexus 4 and most looked best on T3 with apple usually 2nd. That's not good for krait. Some games show up later or not at all on other devices too as they note in the article (usually just late, but some you'd still be waiting on). I really hope other soc makers start to optimize games soon like NV does.

Considering Tegra4's gpu is smaller than Adreno 320, T604 or PowerVR SGX554MP4:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tegra-4-tegra-4i-gpu-architecture,3445-5.html
I find it hard to believe there is much of a die size advantage (if at all, please provide a link if you have it) over T3+ @28nm. I've only found one table with all the chips and it was in chinese...LOL. Unfortunately I can't read that :) But AP37 is smaller than 80mm (obviously since it's basically the same chip at 28nm and upclocked to 1.7ghz) so I'd tend to think S4 Pro quad is larger no matter what but I can't seem to prove what size it is. I'd be surprised if S4 pro is smaller than 80mm because of the implemented gpu features etc that NV cut out to get to 80mm with T4 (no unified shader, no opengl es3, dx9_3 etc). They hampered a few things they didn't think we'd need for some time (I'd say correctly) while everyone else went full out for features, compute etc (compute is still almost useless on the desktop, not sure why they'd waste space on a soc for it right now). Do you have any proof Quad Krait is smaller than 80mm (I can't find 28nm T3+ die size either, but it's clearly less than 80mm since die shrink)??

Considering the benchmarks of the A320, I don't expect a A330 (which Qcom said to anandtech is roughly 50% faster than 320) to beat T4 in many gpu benchmarks as 50% faster is far slower than A6x (actually I don't expect them to win anything in gpu vs t4):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6426/ipad-4-gpu-performance-analyzed-powervr-sgx-554mp4-under-the-hood
Ipad4 is pushing a much higher res than nexus 4 and 50% would not touch apple's chip even if it ran the same res as nexus4 and not 2048x1536 of ipad4. I think Qcom made a mistake here, and believe they were caught off guard by NV going 72core on the gpu instead of 48. They will be behind until they release the next chip after the S800 (A330+Krait400). T4 will be smaller and cheaper than S800 I believe but we'll see. It's telling that Snapdragon 600 and Exynos 5 octa have issues in phones (with octa getting kicked out of Galaxy S4 already) and S600 not getting above 1.7ghz in a phone that I'm aware of yet and I don't see many announcements yet for phones. The 800 is coming on a better process but that won't fix the gpu and no doubt apple will blow by everyone in a few months...LOL. Rogue6 and T658 seem to be the wildcards here for now, but I'm guessing Rogue6 is in A7 (whatever apple calls it) and will beat everyone for a while. Theoretically, apple could just shrink the current chip (32nm, 100mm currently if memory serves) and upclock it to beat everyone even if T4 catches A6 (it should). It would likely come in under Tegra4's 80mm then. I don't think cpu's will matter much this year (everyone will be A15 anyway) since I don't know anyone that wants to do content creation etc on a phone/tablet and games will concentrate on gpu for a while. The cpu won't be slowing down the games, the 2560x1600 resolutions will. I only have 1920x1200 (and 1680x1050 on 2nd mon) on my PC and really need a new card...ROFL. I still can't believe my dad's nexus 10 is higher res than my $650 Dell 24in. But I can't complain about google shoving us all up by default :) It's all good from my view but the hardware will need a bit to catch up to the screens currently :) 1080p on phones helps too. Between that, consoles, Shield etc everything will be made for 1080p and up now in games. I like that. We've finally kicked 720p games to the curb ;) Easily coded cross platform gaming might actually be a reality this xmas or next, which should raise the quality of games as dev costs drop. I think this year the soc market will be a lot more fun to read about if only to see what they do with the gaming power.

One final note: I don't think many people have studied the benchmarks of T3+, partly because not a lot have reviewed it:
http://www.slashgear.com/htc-one-x-review-2-07259494/
http://www.slashgear.com/htc-one-x-benchmarked-vs-jelly-bean-galaxy-s-iii-fight-24253882/
Beats the galaxy S3 here in quadrant and basically a tie in Antutu.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/09/htc-one-x-plus-for-att-review/
A lot a good scores here vs. galaxy s3 also. It beat Galaxy in 4 out of 6 benchmarks here (virtual tie in a 5th) Quad krait of the Droid DNA only really manhandles it in GLBench here (320 obviously smacks around T3's gpu, single channel sucks). Other than that T3 does fairly well against it too, winning 2 benchmarks vs. krait and ~45mins more battery life. I'm not going to say T3+ is better (it shouldn't be it's over a year old and hampered by single channel), but it holds up fairly well after the boost most sites ignored. Most of the major sites haven't even reviewed the phone. This phone is one of HTC's current top end.
http://www.fonearena.com/blog/57021/htc-one-x-benchmarks.html
More good against galaxy (browsermark, smartbench, nenamark2, sunspider javascript etc, even beats a few quad krait benchmarks). Not the best, but not junk by any means ;)
 


You seem to have misunderstood much of what I said.

I said that Tegra 4 doesn't beat Snapdragon 800 in my last post, not that Snapdragon 800 beats Tegra 4. By my math, their CPUs should be fairly similar in performance.

I never said that the process has no demand. Quite the opposite, in fact. I said that supply is far more limited than demand and that is true.

It could be more expensive, again, because of that process technology. It is known for poor yields and is in very high demand while having little supply. Using older processes is often cheaper at least until the new one matures despite the new one being able to make smaller, less power-hungry versions of any given chip even before it matures.

I never said anything about anyone having a die-size advantage over anyone, so I really don't know why you spent so much of your post about it.

I don't know why you're going into graphics because I repetitively said that I didn't know about how they compared in it and made no claims about it.

I also went out of my way to call T3 not junk, but rather just not particularly impressive in many ways.
 

Uberragen21

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[citation][nom]Anonymous[/nom]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.[/citation]
You obviously completely misread that. Translated for the layman, it states that it's using 10x less bandwidth than max to fill at 60Hz. Therefore, theoretically they could get 10x higher pixel fill rate if the software and screens could allow it.
 

somebodyspecial

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You said:
"Also, it doesn't matter what form or process node we look at T3 in, it still wasn't really impressive against Krait competition and a few others. Yes, the die-shrinks and such improved it a lot, but they still didn't completely fix it and besides that, it would have probably been more expensive than you seem to think to use the latest die-shrink of it. It's still a large SoC and it's on a process technology that is in much more limited supply than there is demand for it."

Tegra 3+ is 28nm. I thought all top phones were 32nm (some samsung/apple) and 28nm (all others now). Demand is at an all-time high for 28nm yes, but I'm not aware of a shortage in supply now. Underestimated product sales maybe, like nexus 10/4 sold out in hours, but not a supply issue here (google miscalculation I'd say for both, but all in stock now). TSMC fixed yield issues AFAIK on 28nm quite a while back and these are far less complicated than a Kepler etc & is cheaper to produce and deal with (heat/watts/battery etc) than T3 regular 40nm. I don't understand your "large soc" size comment or your expensive vs. what I seem to think remark, with 28nm being mature & far smaller than a 40nm T3. I don't see many phones that use 28nm that aren't in stock. IF your statement is true shouldn't a LOT of stuff be out of stock on 28nm socs? With your quote, how can I NOT talk about die size/cost of the soc? You called it large, and in many ways said it's expensive (and now commenting on yields too), thus causing a die size/cost/yield discussion here :)
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semiconductor-blog/2012/08/tsmc-gets-28nm-yield-up-over-8.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411985,00.asp
That's clear back in Aug 2012, Yield up over 80%, & pcmag from Nov 2012 (UMC still has issues though, but heck, only 15% of their sales are even 40nm & 5% 28nm - they suck?). There are others that have written yield issues are over at TSMC. Digitimes notes TSMC lacked capacity in 1H2012 only not 2h2012. I'd say it was mature in Aug 2012, likely better in Nov2012 as shown with orders returning (and we're 3 months later now past that pcmag article).
The 40nm T3 is 80mm, same as T4, already not a large soc in either case. The 28nm T3+ is smaller than both (as I noted before) and easier to integrate as such. I don't think I misunderstood what you said when you called T3/T3+ a "LARGE SOC" either. The Qcom S4 chip is bigger than T3+ (maybe not T3 40nm but even that isn't proven), T3+ is NOT a large soc, it's smaller than all chips mentioned by me and even old T3 is only 80mm thus quite small compared to exynos 5250 (nexus10), A6, A6x and I'm guessing S4 pro also (you have any data showing S4 pro is SMALLER?). I can’t find any top chip less than 80mm so how is tegra 3@28nm a large soc? You mention cost/expense for the 28nm chip & die size comes into cost figures and directly relates to how much you make when hawking your chips. T4 is cutting cost by cutting die size (just like T3 did), which with the modem should finally allow enough unit volume to make money...LOL. Small dies enables you to sell your chip cheaper (which will be even cheaper when they ship T4 in July to OEMs) with likely better yields months from now (~90's instead of 80's?? shield soaks up all the first runs), making the phone margin either bigger or just allowing a cheaper phone to be produced and sold lower. I didn't consider the older process being cheaper here since I knew 28nm is mature @TSMC as shown which is where all T3/T3+ chips come from AFAIK, but you are correct it can be more expensive when on a new process (but not here/now for T3 vs t3+ @TSMC). I believe NV delayed 28nm to make sure they got good enough yields/volume for nexus 7 etc. At the time they shipped T3 to google, TSMC was having 28nm issues for 6/11 OEM's (ouch). Qcom etc went 28nm for quad (which delayed them) and missed nexus7, as design work started for nexus 7 Jan2012 with mass production in may'12. Maybe you weren't aware of the yield changes in the last 8 months at TSMC

Responding to Aicom you said:
"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."

& more "but they seem like they'l still have a little room to make up, at least in CPU performance, to be the best"

& another post:
"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."

& one more & this is the latest comment:
"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."

Not quite sure how NV can be behind (or tied) when neither S800 nor T4 is out so that statement can't really be proven either way yet. But OK...I don't see you clearly saying they're tied here anyway (until just now in the post I'm replying to), and even then based on what data? Everything I have found shows A15 should win everything in CPU.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6425/google-nexus-4-and-nexus-10-review
Even the Tegra3 does OK and this is the OLD one in OneX on 40nm not 200mhz more 28nm T3+ (I think the one they benched runs 1.5ghz). Tegra3 is beating Nexus4 in sunspider, browsermark, Octane, & Kracken. Tegra3 beat Nexus 4 in ALL 4 CPU benchmarks and this chip is not DIE SHRUNK to 28nm running another 200mhz more (this says even T3 is rather good and grey will be great at 2.3ghz with A9's). Vs Qcom it seems fairly impressive in cpu (gpu got beat quickly). Exynos in Nexus 10 shows the power of the A15 DUAL over Qcom's QUAD tech in Nexus 4. Nexus 4 was near the bottom of every cpu benchmark so how could this be anywhere near TIED with a T4 A15 quad (or any A15 quad?)? What math is being used to extrapolate a tie here? Clearly some lackluster perf is due to unoptimized software as anand noted for Qcom but the dual A15's still smack around all snapdragons in cpu here. This is a november 2012 article here, so if you're still not getting your software optimized by now and you lose in everything you couldn't claim snapdragons are on par in cpu even vs. dual here and certainly not vs quad A15. Even so the dual vs. dual contest shows A15 vs Qcom that IS optimized and still loses by large margins. This is why I expect all A15's to win vs. Snapdragons when quad vs. quad comes later this year (Apple A7 or whatever they call it if A15 based, octa or T4 etc vs. S800). In some cases the dual A15 was doubling the dual snapdragon. You could optimize and consider 100% improvement for 4 cores over their own 2 core and still lose some benchmarks vs. the dual A15 (totally discounting quad A15 here). Kracken and Octane both show this. The A15 dual is over double Snapdragon dual. So even a quad would barely catch the dual in both if software was 100% efficient, which we see it isn't. I'm not quite sure where you're looking to say any A15 would lose core to core vs. Snapdragons, they do not appear even close to A15 in cpu. If you have links to benchmarks please provide them.
I said cpu's wouldn't matter as they'll all be pretty much the same, @~A15 quality - which is why I mainly discussed GPU differences (as I believe I have a very good idea of how T4/A330 etc will perform in gpu using what we know already) but after looking at all the data it's seems I was very generous saying that about CPU. Sorry if that seemed like a wild tangent to you but I thought making my case clear on gpu's was more important than any comment I thought I'd make on cpu's. Discussing cpu's was kind of pointless to me before :) Maybe I was just giving you/others GPU data so you could comment on the benchmarks shown, or for the person who would have liked to see a comment on GPU here :) I usually provide ample links to data to prove the point I'm making, generally speaking too many...LOL - I'm not a fan of being called vague (and want people to look at the data themselves, rather than take my word for it, then comment). As noted the gpu's will be what makes you stand out this year but it won't look good if Snapdragons lose every cpu benchmark. QCOM & others agree on gpu being the differentiators (hence my comments) and they're moving towards gaming/gpu being the centerpiece (wisely):
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=OBR&date=20130228&id=16180571
Hired 35 game devs (news from 28th), to show their chips prowess (NV has been doing this since tegrazone started). Having said that, I don't see how NV (or others on A15) can be behind krait 300/400 when krait is slower than A15 as aicom noted in the link below and the benchmarks of nexus 4/10 show this clearly unless you have proof of the reverse? Blamed on software or not, nexus 4 got killed in everything on cpu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krait_(CPU)

A15 dual 5250 is faster than any krait shown here and this is BEFORE the 28nm shrink that looks like an extra few hundred mhz to 2ghz vs. 1.7 max now for Samsung's A15's, making this worse than now vs. S600/S800 later. So if you're ahead in both cpu/gpu how can you be behind or tied at all now or later this year? I'm confused. Even if cpu's are considered a wash (it's not a wash as shown) it should be dominant over A330 in gpu (making qcom the loser here). All A15 based chips should be in front of similar clocked Krait quads. I would agree it's perf is closer to A15 than A9 (but not until optimized better, as T3 is A9 and won all the cpu benchmarks at anand vs. S4pro), but it's below A15 unless I'm missing something in the data ;) I'm sure we'll be able to find a winning krait case, but by and large I doubt it. Again, if you have anything at all to prove krait faster than A15 please post it. I'll read it. I haven't found anything showing A15 beaten or tied by krait yet.

From Anand:
"Overall, the Nexus 10 results show us some real promise for what we can expect from ARM Cortex A15 based SoCs. The potential upside to this new architecture is huge."

He ended cpu talk with that. I saw nothing in there saying krait was good. Actually quite the opposite and totally sucking on software using quad so far (he noted most software seems to just ignore their extra 2 cores). No S600's in there yet but they're not going to double perf on cpu IMHO or Qcom is really under-promoting their tech. I agree with his statements based on the benchmarks. I wish he'd have included the ONE X+. It would be closer to T4i. But you can add 800mhz over One X here to guestimate. Grey should be pretty potent. OneX has a Tegra 1.5 vs. Grey (T4i) at 2.3ghz & still 60gpu vs. 12 (T604-ish? or a little better?) and very cheap to make with lower complexity, with fewer unneeded features for most resulting in smaller dies & cost savings (power and materials).

I think the current data shows Krait may have an advantage in power use vs A15, but not perf, but I can't prove the power comment until chips are released and benched in devices. I think the power is why big.little got announced (A15 power sucks somewhat & Arm would know this early on) and it remains to be seen how this plays out on phones. One more note, A6x/A6 is 123mm/96mm, so it's impressive engineering to get apple 6x perf in 80mm if T4 does this. A shrink of apple's A6x chip to 28nm from 32nm would not cut off 43mm (IMHO) and apple's no slouch in the engineering dept (100 PA Semi engineers & 100 TI engineers gained recently when they shutdown mobile etc - they keep buying tons of talent). :) The gpu is basically doubled on A6x which adds the mm to A6x and Tegra 4's is only 10mm on gpu. After these two posts (and more analysis of data doing them & other posts elsewhere) I think Grey may be very compelling with 4 A9's upclocked ~800mhz vs T3 40nm (600mhz faster than T3+) running 60gpu cores with dual channel. I already showed 1.7ghz A9 T3+ winning some benches vs. quad snapdragon and doing a number on exynos 5 in a lot of benchmarks on cpu previously. I really thought Grey was totally low end here but it may be around A330 gpu with possibly better battery with all this and integrated i500 on die. While not directly related to this discussion it's fairly pertinent to the article here (doubling down on efficiency is the title after all...LOL). But I question it getting into xmas crap (doubt it), more like Q1 devices.

OOPS that was some wasted time...We have later data from Feb 25th (not a lot), with Snapdragon 600's now. So we extrapolate a bit more now:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6792/lg-optimus-g-pro-hands-on-performance-preview-snapdragon-600-tested-at-mwc-2013
Snapdragon 600 QUAD losing to Nexus 10 which is only a dual A15 on 32nm. They scored 16309 vs. 11146 respectively (lower is better), a serious butt kicking by Dual A15 CPU correct? This would get worse vs. Octa/T4 quad's @28nm right? The supposedly "speed enhanced" A320 of S600 barely catches the Mali T604 in Nexus 10 vs LG Optimus G PRO in egypt ON screen (26 vs. 25.9 margin of error?). In offscreen 1080p Mali604 blows it away (33fps Nexus10 vs. 26 for A320 on S600 even a 50% improvement for 330 in this case would be beat here by T604 already). I do think they may be quicker in shipping units but we'll see. We need more benchmarks but I see nothing that special in 600 even vs. dual A15 cpu's so far (conservative above I think totally discounting quad A15 here, so how much better does S800 do vs. even dual A15s?) and the gpu is just a bit lacking no matter how you slice it, it seems. Still seems software optimizations need work. All 600's are supposedly "speed enhanced" A320's AFAIK (but this one didn't bench like one IMHO, should match T604 here). I expect A330 of S800 to end up ~T604 now (winning more than losing) at the same res which the T4 should handily beat, T658/Rogue6 should too (A330 will be against these 3 not T604 though). Octa got kicked out of Galaxy S4 though, so either samsung chips have issues in phones, or all A15's will :) We don't know power/heat etc of the gpu in octa vs T4 which can have a huge impact on usability in phones, or even a tablet. But T4 is 80mm vs. 5250 96mm so should be less power IMHO with 10mm gpu vs. larger T604 & up. Octa uses PowerVR SGX544MP3 @ 533 MHz supposedly, not sure it's not a T658? T678? or something else (or all of them)...who knows...Depends on who you believe...LOL (Multiple versions seems likely). But T4 has a smaller gpu than everything else AFAIK so can't be too bad on power. Obviously I'm off your post in a lot of this blazorthon (my tangents? :)) so if anyone has comments on the data here, please jump in. This is just me analyzing all the data out loud so to speak. Is samsung's 28nm process showing exactly what Blazorthon says above basically where they have a mature 32nm but sucking on 28nm for awhile (which has no bearing on TSMC 28nm but still...)? Hmmm...Questions questions and more ????'s. :) It will be a sad state of affairs though if nobody can get A15 quad in a superphone. The freezer Nexus 4 at anandtech shows interesting throttling happening a lot on the regular non freezer one. Note it's not overclocked because of this, just that when it doesn't throttle it scores 39.6 vs. 25.6 in glbench. That's a heck of a lot of throttling for snapdragon gpu. It seems they're clocking (for spec claims?) way higher than you ever run on the gpu or this phone wouldn't be so fast in a freezer right? I'm wondering if all are lying, and wish they'd toss a few other phones in the freezer. I'm guessing snapdragon wouldn't be running flatout until they dropped a hundred mhz at least on the gpu. This only happened on gpu & cpu didn't show an advantage for freezer Nexus4 (so the adreno 320 is overheating a lot and downclocking?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos
Regarding my Octa comment before on overheating: Contradictions all over on octa even in the same article unless they have 4 versions I guess: says it uses 544mp3, and lower in here it says T678 or 554mpX?...I'm confused...What the heck is it using for a gpu? Is samsung going to be late because they can't figure out what works yet in a phone? Even the cpu's info here conflicts with itself...LOL. Is it a 1.8q+1.2q, or 2.0+2.0 for octa (with single/dual/quad A7's?)?...Are there 4 versions of octa? Jeez get this crap straight samsung...whatever :) I think I've read too much this last month ;) Comments welcome here if anyone has better spec data :) I hope toms does an article like this one on OCTA. A deep dive so to speak like they did here on Tegra4 (S800 also perhaps, since we basically know a good bit on S600 now and it's not the flagship for the year).

For stock people because I'm too lazy to make another post today :)
If apple throws it's hat heavily behind games (much like Qcom seems to be doing now with 35 devs in house) I will likely sell my NV stock xmas or Q1 unless it looks like it will be a while before apple optimizations kicks in (or READ even more then as I get more paranoid...LOL) or at least spread more evenly across the 3. Currently I don't like apple without games being a major focus going forward and market share keeps dropping across macosx/ios :) I like QCOM until everyone ships a modem (all bets off after that). They're shipping ~38% of the modems currently (~86% of LTE if memory serves, sorry read that a few weeks ago, can't find the link again...LOL), but that's a battle by end of the year I think (or Q1'14). Is everyone entering the modem market this year?:
http://low-powerdesign.com/strauss/
Yes way off our discussion now - this last bit should have been at seekingalpha/fool.com etc but whatever :)
 

somebodyspecial

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Anandtech Confirming my data in my previous posts:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6787/nvidia-tegra-4-architecture-deep-dive-plus-tegra-4i-phoenix-hands-on/4
"All of that being said however, NVIDIA still seems to take a conservative approach to die sizes in mobile, which gives it the flexibility to significantly undercut Qualcomm in costs to OEMs. I do believe this was a key part of NVIDIA’s success last year with Tegra 3 ending up in both the Nexus 7 and Microsoft’s Surface RT."
Just last week 24th :) So according to them, TEGRA is CHEAPER than snapdragon (and others). Die size counts, and allows you to sell to oem's cheaper. Note he says Tegra4 will cost more than T3, but they will still be cheaper vs. Qualcomm (because they cut features to save die space as I noted previously). No DX11.1, opengl es3.0 etc etc...

Regarding 4i, I forgot to mention it's not the same as A9 in T3. It's 15% faster on top of the 2.3ghz vs. 1.7 T3+ etc due to the change to r4p1 vs. r2p9 on the T3 which they show in the link above. Grey looks pretty good on paper for their lower end chip :) Very balanced it seems. Gpu up 152mhz, 6x the gpu cores, and cpu up 700-800mhz over orignal T3's, R4P1 15% faster clock for clock. That's a lot of improvements. I definitely take back my original statement that 4i was for $200 phones...LOL. I'm guessing the die on this is in the 60's, which again should give flexibility to prices under Qualcomm. Anand says "significantly" less and he's referring to the T4@80mm ("still...conservative").
 
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