NVIDIA's Tegra 2 Take Two: More Architectural Details and Design Wins
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2011 2:51 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola Droid
- Tegra 2
- LG
- Optimus 2X
- ATRIX 4G
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
Twelve months ago NVIDIA stood on stage at CES and introduced its Tegra 2 SoC. It promised dozens of design wins and smartphones shipping before Spring 2010. That obviously did not happen.
What instead happened was NVIDIA lost a number of design wins, many of which we centered around mobile OSes other than Android. There were a number of Windows Mobile/Windows CE based designs that never made it to market, and a lot of efforts around earlier versions of Android that never went anywhere.
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.
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DigitalFreak - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Anand or Brian - any idea what carriers the 2x will be available on in the US?therealnickdanger - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
While I don't know anything officially (I don't think anyone does yet), LG brought its current Optimus line to all carriers. I would imagine that they will do the same with the 2X - assuming one carrier seeking exclusivity doesn't dump a pile of cash on LG's doorstep.If the LG Optimus (S, T, One) are any indication of the build quality of the 2X, then I will probably be in line to buy one as soon as it is made available on Sprint. I love my Optimus S.
Cali3350 - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
Probably the iPhone 4. When it comes to being smooth iOS is untouched at this point in time (probably because everything is GPU accelerated).Cali3350 - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
Clearly posted in response to the wrong item, sorry.metafor - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
I think those are "throughput" numbers, not latency numbers. The technical reference manual:http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/co...
states "cycles" definition is merely the minimum number of cycles it takes to issue, not actually execute the instruction.
VADD, for instance, takes 4 cycles for VFP (scalar) and 3 cycles for NEON/ASE (6 to writeback).
Cali3350 - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Have to say Im pretty wildly disappointed with how you guys seem to be mentioning it will be several months before this thing launches.I am desperately waiting for a new phone right now, but want the new tech. The HTC Mecha looks like it will be a killer phone but will still be running the same old Snapdragon HTC has used since the Incredible. I was really hoping either the Optimus or the Motorola Tegra 2 phone would be out by end of January/February, but that seems like its DEF not happening after reading this. That is all sorts of disappointment.
aebiv - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
You mean the HD2 and the Nexus One... Incredible and EVO were late to the Snapdragon game.sirsoffrito - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
I have a Droid Incredible. I beg to differ.solipsism - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Is the die size different from the Cortex-A8? I’m wondering how this could affect placement in other smartphones.solipsism - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Er, I mean in the dual-core variety.