I fear for the day
they run out of MArvel superheroes and I get kicked in the face by a DREDD card.
Two cores is not enough for chip maker Nvidia, so today it demo'd 'Project Kal-El' - aka Tegra 3 - its first quad-core processor for mobile devices. 'Kal-El' can drive a 2560 x 1600 display and run 1440p video smoothly on it. Not much call for that in a phone perhaps, but next year's tablets - imagine an iPad with a pixel …
This seems to compete directly with another smartphone-to-netbook Cortex-A15-based SoC due before the end of this year, Texas Instruments' OMAP5: http://newscenter.ti.com/Blogs/newsroom/archive/2011/02/07/not-just-a-faster-horse-ti-s-omap-5-platform-transforms-the-concept-of-mobile-615064.aspx Aside from all the graphical oomph, things like USB3 host support and SATA 2.0 make the OMAP5 look like a genuine contender for low-end laptops/nettops.
"due before the end of this year"
that's an odd thing to imply/to say, remember samples do not make 'mass produced' products, only limited run's.
that that page states
"Availability
TI's OMAP 5 platform is expected to sample in the second half of 2011, with devices on the market in the second half of 2012. The OMAP5430 processor is offered in a 14x14mm Package-on-Package (PoP) with LPDDR2 memory support. The OMAP5432 processor is offered in a 17x17mm BGA package with DDR3/DDR3L memory support. "
that's samples by Q2 not products remember, and even Texas Instruments Brian Carlson on the OMAP5 spec said 'ready for Christmas 2012', so at least 18 months away before real products start being PR advertised it seems.
http://armdevices.net/2011/02/14/texas-instruments-talks-omap5-omap4 around 2 minutes in
the only officially stated quad ARM available for products on shelves this year 2011 is the Freescale i.MX 6Quad back in 3rd January so far
"Freescale is targeting these chips at tablets and similar low power devices. While you hear a lot more about consumer tablets powered by Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Samsung chips, Freescale’s low power chips are actually available in nearly a dozen tablets from white box Chinese vendors today, and the company’s low power chips power the majority of E Ink eBook readers on the market.
The company has been a bit behind the curve in the dual core chip space, but by launching new single, dual, and quad-core chips at the same time, Freescale will be among the first companies to make quad core ARM-based chips available.
All three new chips will begin sampling in the second quarter of 2011, and the company expects devices using the new chips to hit the market before the end of the year."
see the other thread http://forums.reghardware.com/forum/1/2011/02/16/apple_nvidia_conspiracy
good question K, can it even come close to the ARM Mali T604 at 850 milliwatts fully loaded, unlikely.
http://www.rethink-wireless.com/print.asp?article_id=3942
"
Mali is designed to work with ARM's latest CPU core, the Cortex-A15, which targets smartphones, tablets and even servers. Up to 16 2.5GHz cores can work together for these larger systems.
Mali T604 will be compatible with Microsoft’s DirectX 11 and with OpenCL 1.1, both programming frameworks for parallel processing over multiple cores.
The inclusion of DirectX 11 aroused speculation that this programming technology would soon be supported fully in Windows Phone 7. Currently"
did Nvidia cheat with kal_el to improve the perception!
it seems maybe they did, perhaps someone should capture that video screen before it vanishes!
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/02/tegra-roadmap-revealed-next-chip-worlds-first-quadcore-mobile-processor/
comment care of
BOB ON FEBRUARY 16, 2011 AT 7:53 AM
"Look very closely at the Coremark slide – they say which compiler version and what switches are being used. The Nvidia SoC’s use GCC 4.4.1 with -O3 and Intel uses GCC 3.4.4 with -O2 etc…
Why in the world use such radically different environments?
What are the results if the same compiler and switches are used?
This really is an unfair comparison it would seem.
-Bob"
That was covered by heise.de: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Nvidia-zeigt-Quad-Core-ARM-Tablet-1190778.html
It is in German but the gist is that the code on an Atom D525 (2 Kerne/1,8 GHz) compiled with GCC 4.4.4-10 -O3 -DMULTITHREAD=8 -DUSE_PTHREAD -lrt / Heap / 8:PThreads has a higher score.