Maximum PC

I can't believe that news of NVidia's upcoming Tegra "computer on a chip" isn't getting more publicity. I'm psyched about the upcoming smartphones and mobile devices (netbooks, mobile internet devices, portable media players, mp3 players, etc.) that are going to have this tech. I truly think that it's going to revolutionize the genre.
There are three versions of "Tegra" the Tegra APX 2500, the Tegra 600 and the Tegra 650.
The APX 2500 is for smart phones, both the Tegra 600 & 650 are for PMP's and netbooks. NVidia claims that these chips use less than a watt of power while in full use and will have a battery life allowing 100+ hours of audio playback and 10+ hours of HD video playback. They claim that the chip has MORE media playing power than a laptop at 1/10th the wattage. The 600 has a 700Mhz multicore CPU w/ 166MHz RAM and is 720p HD capable while the 650 has an 800MHz multicore CPU w/ 200MHz RAM and is 1080p HD capable. The 600 & 650's can also support up to a 12 megapixel camera sensor which sounds exciting.

I was hoping that the new Archos 7 was powered by this but it's not. It looks like it has a similar but not as powerful chip. I'm still trying to find news/reports of products that will use this tech.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra_600.html

http://www.youtube.com/tegrabynvidia

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/55043/NVI ... 060408.pdf

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... &Itemid=66

Not really.


I see these people on the subway clutching their iPods, staring at these tiny little LCDs screens, and I just can't see that as being the future.


Might be better off in one of those tiny Asus laptops.

I'd be more impressed if I wasn't already drooling over Intel's Atom. An x86 processor that fits in my phone? Sex.

Yeah but NVidia says that this is supposed to be waaay better than Atom (at least at multimedia and gaming which is what I care about). I was originally excited about Atom too until I saw this in action.

I've had my eye on Tegra as well, looks like a sweet platform. It'll be nice to have more competition in the high-power mobile computing market regardless which one comes out on top.

Looking forward to tegra yes, but to be honest I'm more interested in ti's OMAP3 solution, which I think uses a more recent cortex arm architecture vs arm11 which tegra is based around.

I'm looking forward to open pandora more than ever. Using my N800, I believe arm isn't far off from being competitive with almightly Intel at a performance/power ratio - a 600-900MHz cortex based omap3 system on chip, may very well, give a similar user experience as lower clocked atoms, while the entire chip utilizes only a watt or less.

Don't get me wrong. I love the atom. In the few weeks I've had my netbook, it's become inseparable (maybe it's also thanks to ubuntu...). The performance offered by a the 1.6GHz atom proc isn't anything to sneeze at for general purpose usage - sure it's pathetic for video encoding, and new games, but I've got a desktop for that. And while YES, firefox is faster on my desktop, I notice the lack of resolution instead of the slight drop in speed (i.e. not the cpu's fault).

I just think that Intel has quite a way to go to get to the super thin profile arm can currently offer. Menlow is great, but isn't it. I'd say it's 2 generations off before it can really light a fire under arm's seat.

Here's a couple changes to expect from arm -
1 - cortex core - a redesign offering loads more power
2 - system on chip architectures - e.g. omap3, tegra which make it easy for manufacturers
3 - REALLY low power. The OMAP2 devices would run on standby for over a week easily.
4 - Ubuntu ARM - http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/11/17 ... untu-arm/1 - linux with support and libraries for arm - with us becoming more and more independent of windows, linux is going to make these low powered arm devices shine.