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  • ahmedz_1991 - Sunday, May 29, 2011 - link

    it's the future already folks;
    with NVidia's Kal-EL, AMD's Bobcat and Intel's atom, i can' imagine how easy our life will be !!
    desktops are already replaced by notebooks. Will notebooks be replaced by smartphones capable of streaming into TV's and accepting peripherals !!
    seems like stargate universe here !
  • taltamir - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    these cannot replace desktops. They are very nice advancements, but they serve to complement desktops, not replace them.
  • vol7ron - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    +1 to ahmedz_1991 for being the first AT troller.

    I think we all know that his comment is full of crap, just give him credit, and let him go on his way.
  • vol7ron - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    The video is interesting. The funny thing is he puts it down to 2 cores and says it's not playable and puts it back to 4 cores and says "smoothe like butter", but then he said it's pre-production silicon and to expect a 25% increase in performance for the production silicon. Would that mean it might be playable on production dual-core chips?

    Food for thought.
  • ahmedz_1991 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    if u mean by modern games; Dirt 3, Assassins Creed Brotherhood and Need for Speed Hot Persuit. Then u'll be disappointed as i play them with above medium quality smoothely on my Dell N5010
  • ahmedz_1991 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    if u don't like the post u can critisize in a better way !
  • B3an - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    LOL @ replace desktops. Obviously you dont do any work.
  • ahmedz_1991 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    more money for equal performance but after all my Dell N5010 with Core i5 and AMD HD 5470 ultimately replace my desktop.
    Believe me mobility has its appeal - i'm not building a workstation or something!
  • jkostans - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Obviously you don't play any modern games
  • Lucian Armasu - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    That market is becoming more and more of a niche, with people wanting to play "fun" games instead on their devices. Also, why do you think games have pretty much stagnated in the past few years? It's because they know the PC market is not so big anymore, and they want to capture the notebook market, too.
  • Moz316 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    Oh boy.. Where to start..

    What market is becoming more of a niche? The modern game market? The one worth more than Hollywood?

    PC market not so big anymore? You mean the PC market that continues to grow each year through digital distribution of titles? Or am I missing something?

    Why have games stagnated? Oh yes, it must be becasue of notebooks.. not because of developers devoting most of their time into games for consoles and then porting them over to pc.

    Don't quit your day job... whatever that is.
  • cotak - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Yeah I'll wait till people get their hands on real devices to test before I get excited. Smells a bit like a lot of other tech demo launches done in the past that promises more than they can deliver.

    Tegra 2 has hardly got any traction and they already planning august 2011 launch for it's replacement. And a quad core for battery limited devices? Seems weird.

    What I mean is tegra 2 OEMs haven't even made their money off their tegra 2 devices and nvidia already wants them to go to a quad core version? I guess that can work for the market in Asia where electronic shelf life can be the same as milk and no one complains and people keep buying what's new. The rest of the world I don't know.

    Also I don't know if there's any need in mobile devices for quad core. I still use a dual core Macbook pro for my mobile needs and a single core iphone 4. While can see having dual core in the iphone could be useful I don't know if I'll never need quad. That's a lot of silicon, for me, that I'd have to pay for which I use rarely. If it doesn't affect battery sure ok. If it does without giving much performance boost (and really do I need quad for angry birds?) I don't see a point.
  • Generic_User_2 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Tegra 2 doesn't have any traction???

    Do you honestly need us to count how many dual-core designs have tegra 2 compared to other dual-core SOCs? Tegra 2 doesn't just have traction, it absolutely destroyed the competition this generation.
  • rangerdavid - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    I'm not sure "absolutely destroyed the competition" is a good way to put it. Close enough, if you only look at non-Apple tablets. Like it or not, the A5 runs rings around it. Just look at the benchmarks in the recent Android 3.1 review on this site.
  • jalexoid - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Sorry, but A5 is not the same generation as Tegra2. Tegra2 is over a year old now. A5 has the same gen CPU core, but 2 newer GPUs. Tegra 2 competitor is/was TI OMAP4430.
  • KoolAidMan1 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Sure, but competition in the marketplace is what really matters. In that case the A5 with the PowerVR GPU has trounced the Tegra 2 tablets both in sales numbers and performance.

    2012 will be very interesting though. New PowerVR quad-core GPUs will be out and the Tegra 3 is looking super impressive based on this tech demo.
  • jalexoid - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Then Tegra2 on phones kills iPhone4's A4. Since it's about the competition in the marketplace.
  • Generic_User_#2 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    wasn't really talking about performance-wise. meant more about the sheer quantity of design wins.
  • cotak - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    That design win has not translated into sales and thus money in Nvidia's pocket. Even their CEO admits as much in their last quarterly.

    People also conveniently miss that most of their wins are with tablets not phones and phones still outsell tablets by a wide margin. And then they also miss again that many of the major phone manufacturers aren't big on the tegra 2. HTC is in bed with Qualcomm, Apple does it's own, Samsung does it's own (they are suppose to use tegra 2 in some devices but so far not that many) and Blackberry's latest device (the playbook) is OMAP powered. Also Windows Mobile 7 Mango is basically going Qualcomm. So where's Tegra in the current lucrative smart phone market vs the still developing tablet market?

    And by the by the smaller smartphones with smaller screens (thus overall should cost less for some parts but with added cost in RF design and parts) are pretty stable in price. Where as the tablets pricing has been coming down. So for me it's really a wait and see whether tablets with super powerful SoC really has a market if people appears to want them at a lower price.

    There's one thing about nvidia's saber rattling with their tech demos and claims to future superiority. This leaves plenty of time for the likes of Apple to time their own releases to beat whatever Nvidia is planning to put forward.
  • Lucian Armasu - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    But that has nothing to do with the chip itself or with Nvidia. It was the manufacturers' stupidity to try to rip off early adopters with $800 tablets, an it was also Google's fault for releasing Honeycomb, not only so late (Tegra 2 was in tablets since October/November) but buggy as well...and with no developer support, in part because they only launched the SDK a day before Xoom. The whole Honeycomb tablet launch wave was a mistake after mistake.

    But I'm optimistic about the second wave of Android tablets with Tegra 3 and Icecream Sandwich, by the end of the year.
  • Rayb - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Dismiss Tegra 2 all you want, what matters is that it still is a very powerful SoC (1.5 years later) and the competitors are nowhere in the same number out of the gate.

    While Kal-El takes front stage at release, Tegra 2 becomes available as a second tier for a more affordable consumption in devices. What surprises me is the lack of competition form the established players (Qualcom, TI, Samsung and ST-Ericsson) in the ARM space, they've been showing their designs of dual cores for a while and still have managed to fumble the delivery.

    http://androidcommunity.com/galaxy-s-ii-vs-qualcom...

    Finally, after much waiting, the results of this new SoCs are nowhere close when expected to compete with Kal-El, if they planed to match it's performance. Just beating Tegra 2 by 25% with higer clocks is not going to cut it, if only the performance was doubled with the newer chip, although more is expected. So, back to the drawing board, it seems your projections are off kilter by a lot. Nvidia has an aggressive roadmap to introduce a new SoC every year, try to keep up!
  • dagamer34 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Quad core is better than dual core in the same way that dual core is better than single core especially in a mobile device; work gets done faster so you can get to a low power state. If that statement weren't true, we'd only ever see single core chips.

    The only reason we don't have 24 core chips is because of the law of diminishing returns. Programming a multi-threaded application is quite difficult, and is highly dependent on the type of work being performed. Unless it's highly linear and parallel and scales with the number of cores (like video transcoding), there's going to be a sweet spot for the number of CPUs located on a die.
  • Lucian Armasu - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    What could make parallel programming much easier? Do the chips need to work in a better way? Or do we need a new programming language to better optimize the code?

    I think we'll see a lot more core by the end of the decade.
  • metafor - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Some things just don't lend themselves to parallelism. A lot of algorithms and tasks are simply serially dependent. Those that are extremely parallel are generally better done on the GPU itself anyway.

    The only reason we've gone to 4-8 cores is because we've reached the end of scaling single-core performance on the desktop side. Realistic benefits of going beyond 2-4 cores even on the desktop are slight to nil in the average use-case, to be honest.
  • dagamer34 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    Not really. It's like trying to learn high school algebra and calculus at the same time, it doesn't really work that well. When one task has to come after another, more cores won't help.
  • jkostans - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Why does nvidia put out crappy tech demos? I mean I'm sure that takes quite a bit of processing power but it looks ridiculous. Also, they are saying this is faster than a core 2 duo. Are you kidding me? Such marketing bull.
  • Generic_User_#2 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    i must have missed that. i don't remember seeing/hearing a reference to core 2 duos.
  • jkostans - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    It's a horizontal line on the roadmap. My guess is they calculated CPU + GPU FLOP/s is some ridiculously optimistic way and its somehow twice that of a C2D E6300 (w/o a GPU involved on the PC side of course).

    All I know is my old single core Athlon XP system with 6800GT would still be loads faster than their "2X" C2D performance.
  • Rayb - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Don't loose sight of the fact that the chip is the size of a quarter and all of that performance can be squeezed into a smaller device running off battery power.

    Ain't technology great? You keep lugging around that system (Athlon XP system with 6800GT) while I do the same with a hand held device with this chip, ridiculous comparison indeed.
  • eddman - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    And I think it looks very good. Opinions, opinions.
  • stephenbrooks - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Agreed. Core 2 Duo came out in 2006. NVIDIA beating its performance in 2011 is not exactly impressive.
  • dagamer34 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    Mind you, it's running at 1/10th the power of a Core 2 Duo in your pocket, doesn't require any fans or a large battery either.

    Yeah, not that impressive.
  • Rumpelstiltstein - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    can it run Crysis?
  • stm1185 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Like for instance would the 8 cores in Tegra 2 and the 12 Cores in Kal El be comparable in performance to the 480 cores in a GTX 570? 8 to 12 cores sounds like a good improvement, but then I think a GTX 570 has 480 cores, so at that level of progression its going to be a long time before these mobile parts match up.
  • dragonsqrrl - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    You're comparing apples and oranges there... the cores they're referring to in the Tegra series are completely different from the cores in Nvidia's desktop GPU's. You can't get an accurate idea of performance discrepancy through core-count comparisons, but none the less the gap is probably much wider then even your estimations would indicate.
  • tipoo - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Nope. The cores are vastly different, the ones in mobile SoC's are far more simple and fixed-function in relation.
  • logic_88 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Ugh. With the Tegra 2's inability to decode high profile H264, I wish I could find a tablet that didn't use a Tegra 2.
  • jalexoid - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    TI should be shot for their hands off approach. I mean, they could benefit a lot if they actually pushed their OMAP4 SoCs...
  • metafor - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Neither they, Qualcomm nor even some of the smaller players like ST-Ericson or Broadcomm are doing that badly. They get less press, yes but look at unit sales and design wins for at least phones. nVidia certainly has the biggest hype -- though their solutions are of course quite competitive -- but the end result hasn't been that they've swept the market. Whatever reason you may want to give that is up to you.

    I think people see the (extremely low-volume at the moment) Android tablet on-slaught, all based on Tegra 2 and they tend to think that translates into a huge takeover on nVidia's part.

    In overall market volume, OMAP4, Snapdragon and to a lesser degree BCM and ST-Nova are still doing quite well.

    Should other companies try to build more hype? Perhaps. I don't know that I care for nVidia's chest-thumping nor their attempt at fragmenting the Android market with "Tegra only" games. A small hack reveals competitive chips such Exynos can play them just fine.
  • Lucian Armasu - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Broadcom I think is very popular in Asia because they have cheaper SoC's. As for Qualcomm, actually Snapdragon had a LOT of hype in 2010 because it was in the first Android 2.1 phones and the first to get to 1 Ghz. Snapdragon was the standard in 2010 that all the other single core chips compared to. Also Qualcomm has that 600 Mhz chip that goes into low-end Android phones. Nvidia doesn't have that, but if they are smart they should be working on Cortex A5 chips, which are cheaper than ARM11 and almost as powerful as Cortex A8. Nvidia should try to conquer the low end, too, because I don't think the high-end will be enough if they want to be the market leader.
  • metafor - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    And if you look at total volume sold last year. Snapdragon didn't exactly blow OMAP3 or Hummingbird out of the water either. It sold a ton, yes, but so did everyone.

    That's kinda the point. There's hype and there's reality.

    Tegra 2 has the added disadvantage that the market it won a lot of design wins in did not explode in sales like the phone market did.

    Nobody's counting nvidia out but there's a marked difference between hype and reality. And I'm not sure I like the suggestion that we travel down a path of companies trying to out-hype eachother through crafted demos, trash talk and underhanded artificial limitation of platforms that fragment the android market.
  • moozoo - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    I think Apple owns the tablet market and they want to keep it that way.
    They are out to kill off all competitors before they even get started.
    Whatever Nvidia throws at it, Apple will pre-emptively respond.
    The A5 owned the Tegra 2. I'd expect the same will happen with the A6 vs Kal El.
  • dragonsqrrl - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    The A5 also debuted many months after the first Tegra 2 devices came to market, so I'm not sure what you're talking about with Apple's "pre-emptive" response. Kal-El is also set to debut long before the first A6 device hits the market (most likely the ipad 3). Tablets should be available this holiday season, and the first smart phones should be out in Q1 2012.

    And I'm not sure how you can say "Apple owns the tablet market" based purely on the A series SOC's when Apple doesn't actually engineer a single major component of the A4/A5. The biggest thing that makes the A5 so much faster then any other SOC on the market today is Imagination Techs PowerVR SGX543.
  • jalexoid - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    "The A5 also debuted many months after the first Tegra 2 devices came to market"
    A5 debuted a year after Tegra2 hit production.

    "The biggest thing that makes the A5 so much faster then any other SOC on the market today is Imagination Techs PowerVR SGX543. "
    And the inclusion of NEON module.
  • Lucian Armasu - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Perhaps, A6 will be a bit better than Tegra 3, but it will be out 6 months later. And then Tegra 4 will be out in another 6 months and it will be better than A6. And so on. Their chip roadmaps don't overlap. It only seems that way now because Tegra 2 was delayed for multiple reasons, but this is why we're going to see Tegra 3 "so early" now, because it will actually be on track this time, and the OS is ready for it.
  • Fox5 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Seems like phones and tablets are finally getting tech demos worthy of the Geforce DDR! Dynamic lighting? At best, we're looking at (low end) Gefore FX level here, although it's interesting nvidia went quad core rather than really pumping up the GPU. The GPU is weak compared to the competition, but Kal-El might just be the strongest ARM part by cpu this year.
  • eddman - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    "The GPU is weak compared to the competition"

    Kal-El isn't even out yet. How do you know if its GPU is weaker than SGX 543?!

    "At best, we're looking at (low end) Geforce FX level here"

    Performance wise, Tegra 2 seems to be at the level of a Geforce 6200 LE at 300 MHz.
    If Kal-El has 2 MADs per SIMD and 8 pixel and 4 vertex shaders , it might perform as good as a Geforce 6600.

    P.S. I'm comparing GPUs, not cards or phones, so I left out memory and bandwidth numbers, although they seem to be comparable.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_...
  • Alien959 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    And because the limited resolution of smartphones I think if the use 64bit memory controller with some low voltage ddr3 ram let say 533Mhz is enough for given application.

    Tablets with 200-300 DPI screens are another question but given their size advantage the can be more advanced memory configurations there.
  • SquattingDog - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Anyone else feel that the Tech Demo seems to have relatively low FPS - even when he says "back on four cores...smooth as butter"...Still, this is amazing for smartphone level equipment, good to see this tech going forwards so fast :)
  • marc1000 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    I want to see this tech go fast enough that in a couple of years we will have tablets capable of runing VMWare software on them, emulating a x86 CPU in a way we could run, say, some serious server software on it. even if it was really slow, but it could replace a BOOK + NOTEBOOK for someone who has to study.

    example: reading a big PDF on the tablet, you get to an simulation. just touch some buttons, launch VMWare, launch Windows 2008 with SQL 2008, then open SSMS and check the items from the book. all in one screen, on your hand, anywhere. =D
  • Mr Perfect - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    Heh. Look at those code names. You've got Superman, Bat Man, Wolverine, and Iron Man.

    I've seen to many movies to have noticed that...

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