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Via Tech Hive

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If you follow the world of Android tablets and phones, you may have heard a lot about Tegra 3 over the last year. Nvidia's chip currently powers many of the top Android tablets, and should be found in a few Android smartphones by the end of the year. It may even form the foundation of several upcoming Windows 8 tablets and possibly future phones running Windows Phone 8. So what is the Tegra 3 chip, and why should you care whether or not your phone or tablet is powered by one?

Nvidia's system-on-chip

Tegra is the brand for Nvidia's line of system-on-chip (SoC) products for phones, tablets, media players, automobiles, and so on. What's a system-on-chip? Essentially, it's a single chip that combines all the major functions needed for a complete computing system: CPU cores, graphics, media encoding and decoding, input-output, and even cellular or Wi-Fi communcations and radios. The Tegra series competes with chips like Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Texas Instruments' OMAP, and Samsung's Exynos.

The first Tegra chip was a flop. It was used in very few products, notably the ill-fated Zune HD and Kin smartphones from Microsoft. Tegra 2, an improved dual-core processor, was far more successful but still never featured in enough devices to become a runaway hit.

Tegra 3 has been quite the success so far. It is found in a number of popular Android tablets like the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and is starting to find its way into high-end phones like the global version of the HTC One X (the North American version uses a dual-core Snapdragon S4 instead, as Tegra 3 had not been qualified to work with LTE modems yet). Expect to see it in more Android phones and tablets internationally this fall.

4 + 1 cores

Tegra 3 is based on the ARM processor design and architecture, as are most phone and tablet chips today. There are many competing ARM-based SoCs, but Tegra 3 was one of the first to include four processor cores. There are now other quad-core SoCs from Texas Instruments and Samsung, but Nvidia's has a unique defining feature: a fifth low-power core.

All five of the processor cores are based on the ARM Cortex-A9 design, but the fifth core is made using a special low-power process that sips battery at low speeds, but doesn't scale up to high speeds very well. It is limited to only 500MHz, while the other cores run up to 1.4GHz (or 1.5GHz in single-core mode).

When your phone or tablet is in sleep mode, or you're just performing very simple operations or using very basic apps, like the music player, Tegra 3 shuts down its four high-power cores and uses only the low-power core. It's hard to say if this makes it far more efficient than other ARM SoCs, but battery life on some Tegra 3 tablets has been quite good.

Good, not great, graphics

Nvidia's heritage is in graphics processors. The company's claim to fame has been its GPUs for traditional laptops, desktops, and servers. You might expect Tegra 3 to have the best graphics processing power of any tablet or phone chip, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Direct graphics comparisons can be difficult, but there's a good case to be made that the A5X processor in the new iPad has a far more powerful graphics processor. Still, Tegra 3 has plenty of graphics power, and Nvidia works closely with game developers to help them optimize their software for the platform. Tegra 3 supports high-res display output (up to 2560 x 1600) and improved video decoding capabilities compared to earlier Tegra chips.

Do you need one?

The million-dollar question is: Does the Tegra 3 chip provide a truly better experience than other SoCs? Do you need four cores, or even "4 + 1"? The answer is no. Most smartphone and tablet apps don't make great use of multiple CPU cores, and making each core faster can often do more for the user experience than adding more cores. That said, you shouldn't avoid a product because it has a Tegra 3 chip, either. Its performance and battery life appear to be quite competitive in today's tablet and phone market. Increasingly, the overall quality of a product is determined by its design, size, weight, display quality, camera quality, and other features more than mere processor performance. Consider PCWorld's review of the North American HTC One X; with the dual-core Snapdragon S4 instead of Tegra 3, performance was still very impressive.

Via Slash Gear

By Chris Burns

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The next generation of mobile processors has arrived in the form of the NIVIDA Tegra 3, formerly known as Project Kal-El, a quad-core chipset with aspirations to dominate the Android landscape in 2012 as theTegra 2 dual-core processor dominated the majority of 2011. Though many of the details have already been revealed by NVIDIA before today on how Tegra 3 functions and is able to bring you the consumer more power, less battery consumption, and more effective workload distribution, this marks both the official naming of the chip as well as the official distribution of easy to process videos on how Tegra 3 will affect the average mobile device user.

NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset has been gone over in full detail by your humble narrator in two posts here on SlashGear just a few weeks ago in two posts, one on how there are actually [five cores, not just four], and another all about [Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing] aka vSMP. Note that back then NVIDIA had not yet revealed that the final market name for the processor would be “Tegra 3? at the time these posts were published, instead still using the codename “Project Kal-El” to identify the chipset. The most important thing you should take away from these posts is this: your battery life will be better and the distribution of power needed by your processor cores will be handled more intelligently.

NVIDIA has provided a few videos that will explain again in some rather easy to process detail what we’re dealing with here in the Tegra 3. The first of these videos shows visually what cores use which amount of power as several different tasks are performed. Watch as a high-powered game uses all four cores while browsing a webpage might only use a single core. This is the power of Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing in action.

Next there’s a demonstration of an upcoming game that would never have been able to exist on a mobile platform if it hadn’t been for NVIDIA’s new chip architecture and the power of a quad-core chipset – along with NVIDIA’s twelve GPU cores of course. We had a look at this game back earlier this year in the first Glowball post – now we go underwater:

Finally there’s a lovely set of videos showing you exactly what it means for game developers and gamers to be working with the Tegra 3 chipset. The first video shows off how next-generation games are being made specifically for this chipset, developers working hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize their games for the Tegra 3 so that gamers can get the most awesome experience in mobile history. Devour this, if you will:

You can also see several examples of the games in the video and how they’ve been improved in the Tegra 3 world. Riptide GP as well as Shadowgun have been reviewed and given hands-on videos by your humble narrator in the past – can’t wait for the enhanced visions! Next have a look at these games running side-by-side with their original versions. Make sure you’re sitting down, because you’re going to get pumped up.

Down to the frames per second, this new chipset will change the world you live in as far as gaming goes. Of course it doesn’t stop there, but in that gaming is one of the best ways to test a processor on this platform, one made with gaming in mind of course, you’ve got to appreciate the power. Have a peek at this tiny chart to see what we mean:

Then head over to the post from ASUS on what the very first hardware running the Tegra 3 will look like. It’s the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, a 10.1-inch tablet from the makers of the original Transformer, a device made to pummel the competition and usher in a whole new age in mobile computing. We look forward to the future, NVIDIA, bring on another year of complete and total annihilation of the competition!