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nVidia Preview 'Tegra' MID Platform
wild_berry writes "nVidia have previewed their Mobile Internet Device platform which will be officially unveiled at Computex in the next few days. The platform features CPU's named Tegra paired with nVidia chipset and graphics technology. Tegra is a system-on-a-chip featuring an ARM 11 core and nVidia's graphics technologies permitting 1080p HiDef television decode and OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics. Engadget's page has more details, such as the low expected price ($199-249), huge battery life (up to 130 hours audio/30 hours HD video) and enough graphics power to render Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS."
All it'll take is a Linux derived version of the thing- considering that most OGG players are software based, all it'll take is an ARM Linux distribution and the source will be quickly ported from the Maemo or Ubuntu Mobile trees if needed (not that this will be the case...).
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Short answer: no.
Atom is x86 based (I think) whereas this is ARM-based. Vista isn't even ARM compatible.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The Quake 3 source is released under the GPL, so yes. :)
The CPU is one of the Cortex MPCores. Other devices with these IP cores at their heart use under 250mW (compared to 2-5W for Intel's 'low power' offerings). The GPU is likely to use more power when in heavy use, but I'd expect it to scale back well. For reference, the iPhone's GPU is almost identical to the 3D chip found in the Dreamcast, which got similar Quake 3 performance (note they don't specify a resolution for this).
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And yet close to 100% of these people are quite happy with their mobile phone, which probably has at least a 200MHz ARM CPU, get upgraded four times as often as their PC, spends more time being interacted with by them than their PC, and doesn't contain an x86 chip or (for 93%) run Windows.
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They aren't even in close to the same space. This is not x86, so won't run Windows. It is in the (well) under 500mW power bracket, while the Atom uses 2W idle and needs a very power-hungry northbridge. Intel are trying to tell everyone that Atom is competitive with ARM, but it's still an entire order of magnitude more power hungry for similar performance at the moment. The 'ten times less power than our competition' dig on the nVidia site is aimed directly at Intel.
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for those who actually enjoy RTFA'ing and want a bit more comprehensive info than a BBC fluff piece, nvidia's marketing page, and some pretty vids on engadget:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37729/135
The APX 2500 is far more interesting to me than the 600/650. Qualcomm and Broadcom better watch their backs.
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Then have a look at this little machine: http://openpandora.org/
we had them in for a demo, and they were pretty much emphatic that they will not support Linux on this part. Compared to the similar parts from TI and Freescale, that pretty much made it an non-starter for us.
It's NVIDIA now, not nVidia. It's been that way for a year or two.
It's at 800x480, and the Quake3 port was a quick hack to test the chip, not a serious performance-tuned effort (i.e. it isn't using the vertex shaders at all, and the pixel shaders are using a very crude translation scheme from Q3's shader language). I'm fairly sure I could get a tuned port to run 100's of frames/sec on the same hardware. More modern games (Doom3/Quake4) would actually run better, but we didn't have the source to play with (and the game datasets are probably a bit large for the platform).
It's 800x480.