Not very long ago all of us had desktops with a single processor and we were pretty content with the processing capabilities of it, a high end P4 system had a single core operating at 3.0 GHz. I still remember my friends boasting of it capabilities and making fun of people owning a processor with lower clock speed. Very slowly things took a turn and the concept of dual cores dawned upon us and people got busy updating their processors to dual cores. A dual core for a desktop is pretty much a norm now and we are still looking at people adopting quad cores for their desktops. The field that is undergoing heavy innovation is mobile computing there has been heavy innovation here not only in terms of Operating systems but also in the processors meant for the mobile platform, Qualcomm with their Snapdragon and Nvidia with its Tegra platform are the ones leading this race.Let us take a look at the Tegra platform.
Nvidia Tegra is a system-on-a-chip series developed by Nvidia for mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants, and mobile Internet devices. Only recently the Tegra 2 Chip was a very hot commodity in the market it powered devices like Acer Iconia, Motorola Atrix and the likes of it, But now things have changed there is a new variant available in the market it is the Tegra3 processor which powers the Asus Transformer Prime the first device with a Tegra 3 chip.
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| The Asus Transformer Prime |
The Tegra3 chip for starters is a Quad core Cpu complemented by a 12 core Gpu.Yes you heard that right dual core chips aren’t hot anymore quad core ones are. But this might be a cause for concern for the battery of the device isn’t it read on the rest of the article to find how this chip smartly manages power consumption.
Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing
Tegra 3 chip according to nvidia offers a significant enhancement over Tegra2 platform in terms of battery performance , It offers upto 61% lower power consumption compared to the Tegra2 this saving is achieved trough a very smart technology called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing or vSMP. Here is how this works. The Tegra3 carries a Stealth core or a fifth core takes care of lighter tasks like listening to music, video playback, updating background data and shuts down the four cores. But when there are demanding tasks like Gaming e.t.c the stealth core is switched off and the four cores are switched on one by one thus saving power, quite smart isn’t it.
Next-Gen Gaming
The Tegra3 as claimed by nvidia offers significant enhancement over Tegra2 platform in terms of graphical processing power. It’s 3x faster than Tegra2 Gpu and has support for Stereo 3D, Nvidia’s 3D vision Technology .It supports high resolution and lets you stream the games from your mobile devices to your HD television and lets you use Game controllers.
Nvidia supports the gaming requirements by having a app called Tegra Zone in the android market that lets you download games developed for tegra platfrom.There are currently 40 games expected to release by the end of year and over 15 Tegra3 games under development.
A look at the road map of the next Tegra processors reveals processors with multiple cores and advanced processing capabilities and also a fascination with comic book superhero names the Tegra3 was codenamed Kal-el and the upcoming ones have code name like Stark, Logan, Wayne.But giving serious competition to Tegra3 would be Qualcomm's Sanpdragon S4 .
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