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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."
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
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
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.
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.
Congratulations, you are the first apple fanboy who tries to steal the thread with your MacRumors about the iPhone.
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!
Vista doesn't have an ARM version, you'll have to stick with Windows mobile for now.
However, TFA states (that's right, I actually read it) that nVidia is open to running other platforms, not just windows CE, so if enough interest is generated, they MIGHT actually have Linux running on it.
It's a chipset, though, not a device or anything so ultimately it would be up to the mobile manufacturers to decide what happens, providing nVidia has support for it.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
May it run Doom instead?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As for the resolution, I agree that it's rather strange that they left out the details on this, but we can assume that it's going to be something like 640x400, which is still very impressive.
Full Tilt
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 ]
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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Meorah
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.
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).
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;
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
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.
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A networkable quake3 that you can play over wifi with random people on the train would be fun.
Infact, a phone with enough power to play good multiplayer games, wifi, the ability to auto detect other devices within range, and most importantly the ability to remote boot games from other users (so you dont need to rely on finding people with the same games) would be awesome...
Just imagine the commute to work, and finding random other people on the train to play games with.
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you manage to miss every relevant point in the book in a very long elaboration of the status quo.
nvidia and amd and every consumer electronics company in the world are doing their damnedest to break that status quo and make your phone and everything else a capable all purpose platform. this nvidia chip can go in mobile phones, but its got a video engine capable of 1680x1050. why is that? because ~~***YOUR PHONE***~~ needs that display? good god no. the point is, we're seeing new embedded devices we expect to function in dual roles of a) phone and b) computer replacement.
long shaders let you do tasks like indirection in ways unfathomable for simpler setups. this in turn lets you run more application code in gpgpu land. this lets you save power. 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. 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.
Wow, I'm picking up a serious "nobody needs more than 640K of memory" vibe from you... you're not a PowerVR designer by any chance, are you? Of course people are going to want to continue to play their desktop/console games on their portable devices, why would you design for anything less?
A typical shader architecture can be viewed as a VLIW processor with an interpolator, texture unit, ALU and data store. Each "instruction" for all those units takes something like 512b, or about 64 bytes. 1KB is only ~16 instructions, hardly a "long" shader (the Doom3 shader is ~12 instructions, and it's very short compared to most modern games).
Caching does nothing for you if you can't fit all of the shaders used in a frame on-cache, because you have to reload different shaders for different tiles (whereas a classical architecture, with an app that sorts by mode, has to load each shader only once). Instant 1500x shader bandwidth hit for a 800x480 screen with 16x16 tiles...
Binning on the driver side? On an ARM? Yeah, that'll work... right after the transform, setup and clip I assume (or were you thinking of some crazy-ass feedback mechanism to main memory, costing even MORE bandwidth and power?!?)
And by the way, GPGPU is already running on smartphones (pretty useful to accelerate physics for games, for example...).