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Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)
- nightlifelover 15y agoWhy did Apple break up with Nvidia..? Now they have to face the competition.
- xutopia 15y agoWhat do you mean? They still use Nvidia chips on Macbook and Macbook Air.
- kapitalx 15y agoHe means on the iPhone and iPad. Nvidia acquired PortalPlayer which was the chip used in the iPods, but Apple decided not to use them anymore and developed their own chip. Meanwhile PortalPlayer chips eventually became Tegra. Also due to a lawsuit that was recently settled with Intel, Nvidia was unable to provide Nehalem chipsets to Apple, meaning that Apple ended up shipping Nvidia's Core 2 Duo chipset, but that won't last forever and Apple will eventually need a different partner (ATI). Nvidia announced earlier this year that they are developing their own CPUs based on ARM for desktops/notebooks, who knows maybe that will end up in Apple notebook line.
- tobylane 15y agoOr Sandy bridge and a compatible graphics card.
- kapitalx 15y agoThats the bet nvidia made when they lost the chipset business. I'd say they are more interested in their own CPU specially now that Win8 is compatible with it.
- jc-denton 15y agoSure as you can see they are already quite fast :) It's nice to see a new competitor in the CPU business..
- nextparadigms 15y agoSandy Bridge is good compared to AMD chips, but it's overrated compared to ARM chips. ARM chips are still far ahead in power consumption. Besides Intel, won't even have a Sandy Bridge Atom by late 2013.
- masklinn 15y ago> and developed their own chip. Apple did not "develop their own chip" in any meaningful sense, especially not in back in 2007 when Nvidia acquired PortalPlayer. The iPhone used an off-the-shelf Samsung part (the S5L8900), and PortalPlayer was in the business of audio SoCs for PMPs. The first generation Tegra was more than two years away at the release of the original iPhone. Even if Apple had wanted to contract PortalPlayer for iPhone, they could not have. Since then, they've mostly kept to off-the-shelf blocks, even the A4 only has minor restructuring of the blocks at the SoC level, the GPU is a standard SGX block.
- Steko 15y agoIf Nvidia is extracting a premium over other ARM vendors it's unlikely any kind of mobile deal with Apple would happen. Not sure they'd be crazy about rebranding their mobile flagship with an Apple logo either.
- masklinn 15y ago> If Nvidia is extracting a premium over other ARM vendors it's unlikely any kind of mobile deal with Apple would happen. Not really. > Not sure they'd be crazy about rebranding their mobile flagship with an Apple logo either. Why would they have to rebrand anything? The iPhone and 3G SoCs were not branded, and the 3GS only had minor branding (an Apple logo on the top 20%). The A4 was the first iPhone SoC with truly significant rebranding.
- code_duck 15y agoThat's the problem for nVidia as a supplier for Apple: iOS hardware is Apple branded, and most people do not know what is inside. nVidia wants to build their own brand, but Apple has no interest in that.
- Symmetry 15y agoPhysical quality control issues. There was a big problem a while back with Nvidia integrated graphics failing pretty often that apparently had to do with bad potting material material in the chip modules that didn't have the same thermal expansion properties as the solder that Nvidia had switched to. A large number of MacBooks had to be replaced, costing a lot of money and consumer confidence. Google "bumpgate" for more information. And while Nvidia's Kal-El is really nifty, I'd rather have an OMAP 5 in a mobile device. Four A15s at 40nm will probably drain too much power to get any sort of battery life while playing that demo. 28nm should be much better.
- gvb 15y agoThat means the simulations we're watching require a full quartet of processing cores on top of the 12-core GPU NVIDIA has in Kal-El. Mind-boggling stuff. Mind boggling indeed, but totally absent in the text and demo was any mention of power usage. Four cores running at 75% utilization plus 12 GPU cores is going to suck down a tablet battery in a hurry.
- nextparadigms 15y agoNot (much) more than a Tegra 2 running at 75% utilization. Each Tegra 3 core should run at 50-60% power consumption of each Tegra 2 core, if history is any guide. When every chip maker works on a new ARM chip generation, they try to increase performance while maintaining the same overall power consumption of the whole chip. You won't see an ARM chip with 1W TDP in one year, and 1.5-2W the next year, when the new generation arrives. That's why we see dual core phones now with the same, or even bigger battery life than previous single core phones. Even so, they manage to improve the performance about 2.5x every 12 months, and about 4x every 18 months. That's twice as fast as Moore's Law for x86 chips. That's why the ARM chips keep impressing every year on how fast they progress.
- Symmetry 15y agoHistory is partly based on moving to moving to new process nodes to allow you to do more stuff with less power. Unfortunately Kal-El will be running on the same 40nm process that current Tegra processors are running on. To the extent that the device can quickly wake up, get stuff done more quickly than a Tegra 2, then go back to sleep it might be more power efficient than last generation, but not with something like this demo. EDIT: Remember, the previous generation had two A9 cores, and this one has four A9 cores. My vague impression is that the A9s in Tegra 2 really are more power efficient than the A8s in the original Tegra, but we won't see a transition like that in this generation.
- Steko 15y agoEven worse for Tegra 3, it looks like it's going to start shipping around the same time as Qualcomm's Krait which is 28 nm process. Nvidia needs to ride herd on their supply chain, they keep missing their ideal launch window by a few months.
- UtestMe 15y agoI bet Google will come up with Chrome for phones and let Nvidia fully run on its new OS. I can foresee Android killing more than 2 cores out of Kal-El' 4...
- nextparadigms 15y agoI was disappointed when Google made the same mistake with Google TV set top boxes, and put first Atom chips inside Chromebooks, which led to expensive units. I hope we can see Tegra 3 Chromebooks as soon as they can be shipped in products(August). That should make Chromebooks significantly cheaper and with much better battery life (and thinner).
- nl 15y agoWhat are you talking about? Atom isn't any more expensive than Tegra2/3, nor is the physical size any bigger.
- nagnatron 15y agoDoes it run Crysis?
- thret 15y agoIn case anyone is wondering, Kal-El is Superman's Kryptonian name.
- navs 15y agoThat name bugs me. Made worse by the fact I just re-read Crisis on Infinite Earths so my mind is full of DC goodness. Be sure not to use this under a red sun.
- Fester 15y agoI really hope that somewhen soon someone will introduce next-gen quad core batteries to provide enough energy to power mobile beasts like this one.
- yhlasx 15y agoExactly. Almost everything got better at least by factor of 2, while batteries haven't seen any major improvements.
- daimyoyo 15y agoMy concern with this is heat. If you have 75% utilization in a mobile device, most turn into briquettes. They're impossible to hold. I wonder how NVIDIA plans to address that.
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- Unseelie 15y agoI wonder about the comparison of a tablet to a phone sized device. Kal-el being a tablet, which is rather a lot larger than a phone, the heat dispersal allows for a lot more area, and also you can pack in fans and such.. So while both my laptop and my phone heat up, the laptop heats up a lot less than the phone, while burning far more power...and a lot of that just has to do with having more surface to diffuse off of. Will a tablet half the size of my laptop and four times the size of my phone have the phone's heat dispersal problem?
- pistoriusp 15y agoIt's a feature in colder climates.
- sandGorgon 15y agoI think the problem space is different. Power hungry processes and mobility are usually mutually exclusive and IMHO, they should be. The win in this case is not mobility, but portability I envision that we will see Crysis on mobiles in a couple of years, but that will be in conjunction with a dock - which will not only connect the mobile to a HD display - but also keep feeding it power and optionally cooling it. When removed from the dock, the game will ideally switch to a low poly mode, where it no longer is gonna exercise the GPU+CPU to its max - thereby saving power.
- jc-denton 15y agoWhy do you think they use multiple cores instead of a single fast one?
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- jc-denton 15y agoFor those wondering weather more cores means more power consumption: http://superuser.com/questions/163567/why-does-the-heat-production-increase-as-the-clockrate-of-a-cpu-increases http://superuser.com/questions/163567/why-does-the-heat-prod...
- yason 15y agoFunnily, my quad Intel Core i7 (two cores both with hyperthreading) couldn't play the 720p Flash video on YouTube smoothly... Impressive stuff! The thing I paid most attention to was the way they had figured out at least some way of what to do with those ARM cores. Getting four cores running at 75% (no idea whether they were throttled at the time) means there's some serious work being done. The usual mobile graphics benchmarks don't stress the cpu side as much the gpu side so Tegra3 wouldn't gain as much by running existing demos.
- nightlifelover 15y agoit can, you are doing something wrong
- philjackson 15y agoYea, using flash to play the video.
- dedward 15y agoThat's funny - my Core 2 Duo MBP played it smooth as butter. And you don't get to claim extra cores because of hyperthreading - it's just not the same thing at all.