NVIDIA Introduces dual Cortex A9 based Tegra 2
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In order to compete in that space you need a competent chip. Today NVIDIA is announcing its second generation Tegra SoC. It's creatively named the Tegra 2 and this is what it looks like in block diagram form:
The SoC is made up of 8 independent processors, up from 7 in the original Tegra. The first two are the most exciting to me - a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores. These are dual-issue out of order cores from ARM running at up to 1GHz. If you thought the A8 was fast, these things should be much faster.
The original Tegra used a single ARM11 core. It was multi-core capable but the only version NVIDIA ever shipped only had a single ARM11. By now you know that ARM11 is unreasonably slow and thus you see my biggest problem with Tegra 1. Tegra 2 addresses this in a grand way. NVIDIA skipped over Cortex A8 entirely and went to what it believes is a more power efficient, higher performing option with the A9. I'll go deeper into the A9's architecture shortly, but to put it bluntly - A8 is dead in my eyes, Cortex A9 is what you want.
