Posted on 01/06/2011 10:22:01 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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In the time since NVIDIA’s CES 2010 announcement, the company has shifted resources and focused its entire Tegra team on a single OS: Android. Choosing Android isn’t a hard decision to understand, of all of the available smartphone OS options it has the most momentum behind it.
NVIDIA views the smartphone space like a condensed evolution of what happened in the PC industry. In fact, NVIDIA believes that within the next decade, mainstream PCs will actually be smartphones. You’ll simply connect your smartphone to a wireless display and keyboard/mouse when you’re at your desk, and just take it with you when you’re on the move. This usage model won’t replace high end PCs, but for anything you’d find in the mainstream market it should be sufficient.
Motorola’s recently announced ATRIX 4G and webtop dock is the perfect example of this type of a usage model, although it is a very early precursor to what NVIDIA believes is the future of mainstream computing.
NVIDIA thus expects the smartphone market to evolve very similarly to how the desktop PC market evolved - including being driven by gaming. The Tegra 2 SoC is NVIDIA’s first honest attempt at addressing this market and with today’s announcements from LG and Motorola, NVIDIA is actually gaining some traction.
(Excerpt) Read more at anandtech.com ...
fyi
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The CPU: A Dual-Core ARM Cortex A9
NVIDIA is a traditional ARM core licensee, which means it implements ARM’s own design rather than taking the instruction set and designing its own core around it (ala Qualcomm).
The Tegra 2 SoC has a pair of ARM Cortex A9s running at up to 1GHz. The cores are clock gated but not power gated. Clock speed is dynamic and can be adjusted at a very granular level depending on load. Both cores operate on the same power plane.
I can’t see that far ahead.
Motorola Atrix 4G, HD multimedia dock, and laptop dock hands-on
That docking station is incredible.
To have only one computer and be able to take it with you where ever you go...
It could be the death of netbooks and tablets.
I recently read about Android’s display model. Apparently its way out of date, always compositing the screen image in software on the CPU. So no matter how good your GPU is, you’re still stuck draining battery and getting lower performance than you could have. In comparison, iOS composites your screen on the GPU, and I bet WP7 does it too.
Defenders of this method say it’s needed because of the low-end Android devices on the market that can’t composite on the GPU. However, the technology to fall-back on CPU when sufficient GPU isn’t available has been around for years. Then the argument is made that having a fallback makes things more difficult for the developer. However, auto-fallback has also existed for years, where the developer writes code to draw something and the OS will decide whether it can be done on the CPU or GPU, and take the appropriate route.
So now you have this awesome chipset, but hindered by the OS.
See this :
Honeycomb fixes that redraw issue on the ARM A15 core, and the NotionInk Adam screen will provide even further power consumption savings for text based usage.
Incredibly I learned about all of this on FR, thanks to Ernest, ShadowAce and the Tech/IT ping lists...
Future software will fix this on future hardware. I'm not impressed. The Cortex A15 isn't even planned for mobile devices for a very long time, being aimed at servers initially (which itself won't be for a while). The Cortex A9 is just barely coming on the market as it is, this Tegra 2 being one of the first examples. So you're probably looking at Android being behind for at least three more years.
Just posted this :
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