Nvidia Tegra

INKster said:
Clearly, Fudo never heard of the concept "emulator" before... :LOL:
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Well in fairness the relevance depends how much a performance penalty such an emulator would have. Thinking back to emulators for Play station etc... not all were created equal. Obviously he totally missed that point, but it would an interesting thing to know what kind of hit one was talking about.
 
Sxotty said:
Well in fairness the relevance depends how much a performance penalty such an emulator would have. Thinking back to emulators for Play station etc... not all were created equal. Obviously he totally missed that point, but it would an interesting thing to know what kind of hit one was talking about.
Click to expand...

Well, he was talking about Windows XP on such a device.
Considering that Window 95 ran (more like it painfully "crawled") emulated on top of a modified linux distro setup for MIPS architectures in the PSP, i wouldn't pin my hopes on it becoming a reality anytime soon...
Not impossible, but highly unlikely.
 
Nvidia fud slide
Atom?
No! Dothan.

010.jpg
 
Don't think so, that's Diamondville AFAIK, and indeed there's a tiny bit of overlap there in their target market; however, they are definitely being a bit disingenious by not comparing anything at all against Menlow, and they definitely look a lot less unbelievably superior if they did that. The way I look at it is this: they're doing a decent job, but their competitors are doing an awful one... ;)

Really, Diamondville is a disgrace, and the only reason they made it that bad is likely that they don't want to cannibalize their own market... It would definitely be interesting to see a NVIDIA MCP73 chipset next to a Silverthorne CPU, and I think from a theoretical POV they could do that and it'd result in a much better platform than Diamondville or the SiS chipset-based one, but of course it's not going to happen...
 
Actually ignore me, you're right. This is Diamondville from a presentation that was given less than an hour ago so I guess they realized their mistake:
Tegra.png
 
Arun said:
Actually ignore me, you're right. This is Diamondville from a presentation that was given less than an hour ago so I guess they realized their mistake:
Tegra.png
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The original is a Dothan based Eee motherboard.

The second one is still tosh, that's Diamondville + 945 + ICH7. They should be comparing to Silverthorne + Poulsbo. Silverthorne has a smaller packaging than Diamondville and Poulsbo integrates the ICH on die and again has a far smaller package.

But then that would be misleading enough for an NVIDIA presentation would it :D
 
Thorburn: The point is that mini-notebooks actually use Diamondville, not Menlow, and they're also aiming it at that market so they definitely have a point that they do have such an advantage there - of course, a huge part of their addressable market is based on Menlow, and there much of their advantage both in terms of power consumption & footprint evaporates. And they conveniently forget to mention that. They likely still have a slight advantage though, definitely - but nothing anywhere as drastic as they claim to have.
 
I can't see Diamondville in anything smaller than 7" devices, and I can't imagine Tegra in anything that large.
 
Without wanting to sound narrow minded, who'd want a 12" laptop which couldn't run XP/Vista/OS X?

If you got a REALLY good software solution together I could maybe see it making some headway in the Eee sized ultra-portable market up to say 7-9", but packaging and thermals are less critical than in say a 4" device.
 
Thorburn said:
Without wanting to sound narrow minded, who'd want a 12" laptop which couldn't run XP/Vista/OS X?

If you got a REALLY good software solution together I could maybe see it making some headway in the Eee sized ultra-portable market up to say 7-9", but packaging and thermals are less critical than in say a 4" device.
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Well, they wouldn't build support for it unless they knew something about Windows CE 7.0 and beyond that we don't.
 
Yeah, I agree it doesn't make any kind of sense whatsoever at 12". Maybe they just made the range that big to improve their apparent addressable market... or maybe there's a, actual manufacturer which is crazy enough to actually make a 12" model. I agree 4-10" or even 4-9" is a much more realistic range; maybe they'll get one or two model above that, but I'm skeptical it'd sell that well anyway.
 
I got the impression that x86 isn't that important in handhelds where ARM cores rule supreme. In larger devices Nvidia seems to be looking at hooking up with Via's x86 Nano processors to tackle that market.
 
Even in MIDs and partially in some mini-notebooks, this is the very last gen when x86 will matter because Moorestown will drop PCI/PCI Express support completely, so it won't be able to run Windows XP/Vista at all. They'll also be stuck to Windows CE and Linux, which ARM can also run.

So I think all in all it's not a bad time for NV to enter the market - I'm much more worried about the quality of the solution overall (I still want an explanation for idle power consumption & the Tegra 650's TDP whcih is way higher than the 600). Compared to Menlow, it's definitely quite good and they'll have a clear cost/BoM advantage (not a massive one, but likely quite significant). But against Moorestown, they're going to have to do a lot better than this - so will be interesting to see if they manage to do so... :)
 
Yeah, VIA's platform is definitely quite appealing in that market, and is also a direct competitor; however, it's also true that it'd likely be hotter, slower, bigger and less feature-rich... Being able to support Windows XP is definitely a big bonus point for mid-sized mini-notebooks though. Isaiah is also a competitor there, but sadly the TDPs are higher than I thought they would be (5W for the lowest-end SKU, oh well...) so they'll only compete in the upper-end of the market where NVIDIA's solution makes no sense today.

Anyway, I thought a bit more about NVIDIA's Tegra & their 1080p power consumption numbers. I suspect, but I could be wrong, that Tegra 600/650 is the exact same chip as the APX 2500, with an extra 7x7 peripheral chip for I/O... So how does it support 1080p? Via overclocking/overvolting/binning and possibly a bit of help from non-video decode systems to have enough horsepower.

This would also explain the much higher full system power consumption: the cache/memories just aren't big enough to get as good memory reusage as you'd want for 1080p; this would be little more than a software hack, with all the inefficiencies associated with that. Not too bad a thing given the target market has much higher TDP tolerance, but heh.

I'm sure this platform will get traction given how shit Diamondville is and considering they'll likely undercut Menlow, however I'm much more interested in what they can do with a dual-core (OoOE) Cortex-A9 @ 1GHz on 40nm... When you get to such levels of performance, I don't really think there are any tasks that are CPU-limited on such a screen size; web browsing should be smooth as silk too.
 
Arun said:
But against Moorestown, they're going to have to do a lot better than this - so will be interesting to see if they manage to do so... :)
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Is Moorestown only a threat from a manufacturing standpoint or is there a technology advantage there too? I don't see one today and by the time it hits Nvidia should be on Tegra II.
 
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