Slashdot Mirror
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."
But seriously, this sounds interesting. If they actually manage to pull it off, this might actually make TV on the go a real possibility (compared to strain your neck trying to watch Sex and the City on your phone...).
Now the only question is, how heavy is the battery to allow for such a long lasting device. You can't tell me it actually is this efficient, if it boasts that kind of computational power.
I've been waiting for ARM laptop thing. Real battery life! Why do I need x86 compatibility? Give me battery life every time.
I almost bought an Asus EEE pc this weekend, this is worth waiting to see how it is implemented in consumer devices. Give me a small laptop type that can run linux and I'll buy one or two. Heck, 30 or 40 hours would be enough battery time, don't need 100.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
When I heard that a company was making an inexpensive computer with great battery life, adequete performance and it was going to be 'ultra portable', I was so happy! ... then they released it and it was more expensive than originally planned, and not quite as robust.
... and now nVidia is going to do the same thing to me.
If it can run ffdshow or VLC at 1080p then we're talking something special.
I read an article about the Atom platform, which competes in this space. Apparently only the most powerful version of Atom would have enough oomph to run Vista, so can this nVidia MID handle it acceptably? (I know, the review mentioned it runs Windows Mobile, but I'm curious.)
I'd certainly be willing to offer my meager talents to the effort for THAT kind of battery life. Will an ITIL metrics slide help? :/
Invenio via vel creo
iPhone 3.0. Actually the current iPhone uses Power VR MBX and the new one is rumored to be using the Power VR SGX graphics. The Power VR VXD video IP core can supposedly "supports 1080p H.264 Main/High Profile decoding, as well as VC-1 and a variety of other standards" http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/638 http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/30/apples_bionic_arm_to_muscle_advanced_gaming_graphics_into_iphones.html
It does look really cool, and has great specs, but Windows CE? Think agile here. The CE platform not only builds in a couple years of lag, it also incorporates those internal Microsoft turf "discussions" to ensure this Windows product doesn't compete with others.
Patience...
Pandora comes...and it is looking like it's going to largely deliver on the "promises" it makes.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Is that an auto-generated comment? Are you a bot?
The article is about a new processor for mobile devices. Asking if it supports ogg is like asking if your ethernet cable supports MP3.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Over half the slashdotters here maybe?
Open source of course allows for more flexibility as well as a review for vulnerabilities.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
The article is about a new processor for mobile devices. Asking if it supports ogg is like asking if your ethernet cable supports MP3.
How can I tell if it supports mp3? I looked at the printing on the side of the cable and didn't see anything about mp3? Does that mean I can't download mp3s with this cable? Where can I get an mp3 ethernet cable?
(Sorry, been spending too much time over at AVS Forum, where questions like this are asked daily and in all earnestness.)
This guy's the limit!
May it run Doom instead?
Sounds like an interesting toy, but aren't we twisting the measurements a bit here? Quake 3 came out in 1999. Any modern graphic chip has the graphics power to render Q4 at much faster than 40 FPS. Of course, there's the important question of "do you have the computing power behind the graphics power to make the game playable without lag or stutter on anything but a non-trivial map?", as is "do you have the system resources to get a new map started and get into the game before the other players all have multiple frags ahead of you?". And perhaps the most important question is "at what resolution?". Talking about playing a game anti-aliased at 40FPS but not saying what resolution you are playing at is completely meaningless. While this hardware may be able to 1080p HiDef video, there is an awful good chance that that lame benchmark "spec" is based on a much lower resolution.
I sure hope that this doesn't lead to further hype and dumbing down of video specs. Look for new graphic chips that can run Wolfenstein at 1692 fps or Pong at 31500 fps anti-aliased.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
At best, maybe they'll put some hooks in ffmpeg's library (or directly in VLC as an alternate engine) to call their BLOB to handle the accelerated decoding.
At worst you'll have to use a binary only nVidia-specific player. And given that the ARM+nVidia platform isn't going to be very popular fact, probably not a lot people are going to reverse engineer it (ala "Nouveau" project) - expect if their ARM stack is exactly the same as their x86 and thus the work could harness what's already been done by Nouveau.
But the whole thing is going to be opaque.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Does it run linux, does it blend, in Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of their new overlords welcomes ME!!!!
The PowerVR vs. nVidia comparison is approximately the same as the ARM vs. Intel Atom.
nVidia are producing classical graphic cores.
PowerVR are employing specific techniques (Tile-Based Deferred rendering) which enable them to cram the same performance using a lot less transistors and running at lower clocks.
The nVidia SoC is probably more targeted toward sub-notebooks, big multimedia PDAs (As a example, the TapWave Zodiac was based on an ARM and an ATI Imageon running PalmOS 5) and small internet-enabled appliances.
Smart Phone will probably use whatever is less power hungry and go for PowerVR's designs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
None of them seemed that eager to repeat the experiment. Admittedly, the consensus was that : 1. it had gotten quite a bit better and 2. it still didn't work properly.
YMMV though I guess.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
I'd say Windows Mobile is approximately 18 bajillion gazillion manillion times better than PalmOS, much less the bullshit you get from whatever-seemingly-custom-OSes-Verizon-puts-on-phones-and-some-PDAs.
Seriously, aside from possibly Android, I won't be changing away from WinMo any time in the forseeable future, if ever.
Well, the difference is that they don't use the mobile phone as a PC. It's an appliance. Same as a fridge, or a DVD player, or a TV, or their fixed landline phone. If it does its job, why would you care if your fridge has an x86 in it? Most "normal" people I know don't really do much more than phone on their mobiles and sell the occasional SMS. Very few even realize that they could run any other program on those, much less actually download one, so compatibility doesn't play a role. But I dare say that with a laptop, the expectations are a bit different. People start having these ideas like "can I open the .xls file my boss sent me?" or "can I edit photos on it?" Right before, "ugh, why can't I just use Excel, which I already know how to use?" or respectively, "whoever designed the interface of Gimp should be anal raped with a porcupine. Why can't I use my usual editor?" And that's when compatibility starts to matter. Not by itself, but by having access to the same software.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I will definitely be getting one of these tegra powered devices.
Hopefully, a phone. And, hopefully it won't cost $400.
really, a smart phone with that chipset should only cost about $200.
with 1080p tv/video and gaming.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Except Pandora promises at best a third the battery life. Then again, Pandora is due out very soon, and reading about both it sounds like Pandora is the type of machine nVidia would expect Tegra to be used in.
Centralization breaks the internet.
I can sell you an isotopically pure copper Ethernet cable which I have personally tested for warm sound when streaming MP3s.
Normal price, $100 per foot. But I have a 50% discount for AVS Forum posters. And special this month I'll throw in an ethernet cable impedance tester to tell you when you need to replace your cables due to oxidation.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
50% off, eh? Sounds like a bargain!
What's funny is reading the posts of some of those richer-than-FSM types that frequent there. Other people instantly defer to them on subjects it's clear they know very little about. I mean, since they can afford to spend way too much money on a hobby, they clearly have intimate knowledge of the tech behind it, right? : p I'm not saying I'm an A/V genius (though I also don't try to present myself as one), but I can easily spot someone who's just rehashing the made up BS that was told to him by the salesguy that just sold him his isotopically pure copper ethernet cable at a 5000% markup...
This guy's the limit!
I don't need mobile TV. What I need is a few cheap, reliable, fanless, low power media terminals to stream HD video date from my Gbps LAN server, convert it into 1080p HDMI/DVI for my big TVs.
So what I need is some Tegra PCs with minimal HW (maybe a DVD/Blu-Ray player, but no floppy, modem, or really even a HD - just 8GB Flash and PXE boot) that's mainly LAN and HDMI/DVI connections, running Linux, and full-featured Linux drivers. Preferably open-source drivers that we can tweak to work right, but which get full performance from the HW.
--
make install -not war
If this thing isn't going to run Linux, then I don't know what it is going to run. Certainly not the 'nearly free', stripped down Windows XP for cheap portables.
nVidia would be pretty silly to build this thing and not to provide a proper driver for the only OS it'll probably work under. Of course, if this thing takes off, Microsoft probably will come out with a 'mini XP for ARM-based cheap portables'. But nVidia's got to feed the Linux chicken in order to lay that particular egg...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Perhaps this technology could be used to produce a very small quiet and low power consuming mythtv box...The noise of my current system can be annoying when trying to watch a movie, but i didn't want to skimp on the cpu because i wanted to play 1080p video on it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'm pretty much sure that you can't play Crysis on a Tiler, unless you make the tiler so much over-complicated that it looses its advantage over classical architecture...
BUT, common, I'm speaking about *SmartPhone*. Nobody's going to play Crysis or anything that has more than a couple of kilobytes worth of shader code on a 320x240 resolution that fits in you pocket.
Besides, this kind of situation isn't very likely to happen any way because :
- Even on the desktop you won't encounter lots of kilobyte long shader for the simple reason that there are currently a lot of video boards on current gamers' machine that won't be able to handle such long shaders and will abort execution or even fail to compile them.
Even today, when both major player have already 2 generations of DX10-compatible hardware (GeFroce 8x00/9x00 and Radeon HD2x00 and HD3x00) and there's even a third one comming into the pipeline (HD4x00 will hit market soon), even PowerVR has a DX10.1 compatible chip. But lots of players are still having GeForce 6x00 or 7x00 or Radeon X series in their computer. Thus most game only have optional DX10 support or even separate patches.
- Also the main caracteristic that enable TBR is that chip have huge onchip memory (for tiles and for texture cache). This already takes several kilobyte of on chip memory. A couple of kilobytes more to cache the shaders isn't an issue.
Current limitations on shader for this chips are more due to the chip being lighter to have lower thermal and power limitation, and lack of usefulness on the small screen than technical limitations. I'm not sure where you think they're getting away with less transistors for a tiler either, there's a whole binning engine (and the associated bandwidth) which a classical architecture doesn't have. This idea is based on comparative transistor count back at the time of the Kyros. Of course since then, on big graphic card, the shader complexity has drastically increased. But then again, as I've said, I'm talking about phones. Nobody is going to put a GeForce 9800 inside a phone. Nobody except Intel's Larrabee engineers are thinking about running GPGPU on a smartphone.
By the way, binning can partly be done by the driver, and doesn't necessarily need expensive hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Will that work with nuclear as well as hydro-powered oxidation? I've heard that oxidation from nuclear power is much drier than hydro power, so rust doesn't form as easily, but oxidation happens twice as fast.
Also, is there a website, or maybe a newsletter somewhere, that will tell me what kind of power I get at home? My address is: 513 Maple St.
Thanks!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
In a perfect world this might be interesting. In the real world, if you build such a platform, I can assure you that some script kiddy is going to play games with your system that you will not like.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Will that work with nuclear as well as hydro-powered oxidation? I've heard that oxidation from nuclear power is much drier than hydro power, so rust doesn't form as easily, but oxidation happens twice as fast.
Thanks!
Holy shit. I love the idea of selling audiophiles electricity from the right sort of power station.You know, back when I was young and foolish I'd hear about engineering projects where customers had asked for all sorts of strange features. And I'd explain at nauseam to anyone who'd listen how those features were pointless and messed up the original design. But now I just regard that sort of thing as a business opportunity. I mean, I like hacking stuff to do things it wasn't orginally meant to do. And I get paid to do it. And they want the features.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
My guess is the Flying Spaghetti Monster from the Pastafarian religion.
There are already ARM friendly distros out there, why must it be ported from Ubuntu?
Windows Mobile is vastly superior to Windows CE from a developers standpoint, even though they supposedly use the same core. For example, the function SHChangeNotifyRegister only allows one registered notification at any given time on the entire system on Windows CE (and they don't even document it) but it works fine on Windows Mobile.
I which case, we actually both agree, given that a couple of posts ago I mentioned that this new chip will be perfect for sub-notebooks and PDA. This even makes more sense if the later is coupled with one of those laser-based embed projector. The the hidef resolution will definitely make sense. even if you disavow the use of it, i fail to understand how anyone could claim the lack of the feature is a good thing. I'm not saying that it's a good thing that these features are absent. I'm saying that ultra-long shaders aren't currently widespread. At all. And I don't really see them starting to get massively used in every possible device to the point than even the current-day phones (like the iPhone or BlackBerry) need to start including them ASAP.
On the other hand bigger multimedia device (the PDA that try to both steal the lunch from the iPhone *AND* from the workstation) would definitely have a potential use for multimedia acceleration (currently both ATI and nVidia are working on GPGPU-accelerated multimedia decoding).
I'm sorry I misunderstood you, I was initially picturing someone trying to run Folding@home on their latest phone/mp3player/pda hybrid. I think we definitely were speaking about different class of devices. it requires more advanced caching / buffering, but that should not be a dealbreaker. especially when we start loading our chips with massive onboard caches -- a secret well loved by the gamecube for example. And which is the sine qua non requirement for tiler architecture, and was also used on those kind of architecture for a long time too.
And was also feature on the PS2 which had 4MB of embed ram (big amount back then) inside its Graphics Synthesizer.
You initial comment was that big shaders suck on tiler architecture because the tiler has to load all of them at the same time. Then now you report that bigger onboard RAM are a solution for bigger shader.
I was already saying the tiler architecture requires the chip to have a big amount of on board fast memory and a couple of kilobyte used by shaders isn't that much critical. So the argument of long shaders doesn't stand against tilers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's blasphemous for non believers to write His name out in full unless you write (sbuh) for Sauce Be Upon Him afterwards. And the penalty for blasphemy is death, just FYI. What country do you come from BTW? As an FSM believer I plan to burn down the embassy and kill everyone inside.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Because it's already largely done. Angstrom's not focusing on the form factor right at the moment (though you COULD use it...), Debian's not geared for it, and so forth.
Besides, it was a suggestion, not a requirement. If you want to use something else, just knock yourself out- it IS an open system, you know.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It is blasphemous for non believers to say the name without adding said comment, but what about for believers? What makes you think I'm a non-believer?
If my name wasn't a giveaway, I'm from New Zealand (NZ).