By While NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 is still a great quad-core chipset some would argue that it has been handily outclassed by competitors. Samsung’s Exynos line is moving along with the 5-series SoCs set to be in devices soon, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro is already inside several devices released to date. Well, it looks like NVIDIA will be moving just as fast as its competitors, and the next big step will be with Tegra 4.
According to a leak by Chip Hell, Tegra 4 — which carries the codename Wayne, likely extracted from the last name of the caped crusader Batman — will be a 28nm chipset that has a 72 core GPU. It’ll apparently offer up six times the performance of NVIDIA’s standard Tegra 3 setup, and that would make it one very powerful piece of circuitry.
It’ll be a Cortex-A15 configuration so it’ll be right up there with Samsung’s Exynos 5, and comparable to the new Krait-based Qualcomm series. Hardware features will include support for displays with resolutions up to 2560×1600 and can support 1080p playback at 120hz.
We might even get 4K support, but considering 4K hasn’t even hit the consumer market for televisions yet we can’t say this will be of much significance. It’s always nice to remain future-proofed, though, and that’s exactly what NVIDIA will look to ensure with Tegra 4.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see NVIDIA head to CES with Tegra 4 details in tow, but we can’t say for sure if that will be the case. There haven’t been many tablets rumored for the big show, and the ones that we’ve heard about haven’t really tipped us off to the vendor’s next big chipset. What that says about NVIDIA’s roadmap remains to be seen, but it’s something to note.
Something else of note is NVIDIA’s difficulty in getting Tegra 3 phones to market, specifically here in North America. It seems a lot more OEMs prefer Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line when it comes to high-end phones, with the biggest player — Samsung — making its own very powerful chipset.
The most notable device to launch with Tegra 3 thus far is AT&T’s HTC One X+ but pickings are slim beyond that. To say NVIDIA would like to woo more competitors to go with its chipsets for phones would be an understatement, but the vendor still enjoys a very nice spot within the tablet game. What would you say to having the apparent beast that is Tegra 4 within your next phone or tablet?
[via Engadget]
i personally dont like the tegra range of processors. During heavy usage, it is good for example gaming. When doing small tasks shows lag
This new chipset should fix that. :D
What Tegra 3 device that you have lags because of the processor, my Infinity chugs along at times, as does my wife’s TF300, but it’s NOT because of the Tegra 3. It’s because of the bottleneck Asus implemented with their lowest denominator internal storage
I see it on my TF300, and nexus 7 to a lesser extent. If I’m updating an app from the market in the background or syncing email for examples, scrolling homescreens or web browsing gets really choppy. Web browsing, in general, stutters too much. That shouldn’t happen on a quad core A9. It didn’t happen on my dual core S3 sensation when I had that. I think there’s definitely a problem with Asus’ Android builds (like broken HW acceleration in the Play store), but there’s something not quite right with the Tegra 3 either…remedial background tasks shouldn’t bring a chip like this to it’s knees.
I have a Lenovo A2109, which also has the Tegra 3 in it. I don’t see the stuttering or choppiness you’re describing. Not to say its flawlessly smooth, but I rarely notice it get choppy.
This is due to Tegra 3’s single channel memory controller. all other SoC uses dual channel memory controllers. this is why the slow down.
Wayne should fix this with Dual Channels. Also, Apple’s Ipad 3 uses 4 channel memory controller. 32bit each, for 128 bit total. however, they’re stuck using DDR2.
Tegra 3 to compensate for the single channel memory, is able to run DDR3L, LPDDR3.
Tegra 4 CPU’s should be much more powerful. GPU too.
Yeah, that’s the io controller and internal memory. As far as I know that’s separate from the Tegra 3 chip. Flashing Paranoid Android on my Infinity helped make it run a lot better but it still doesn’t hold a candle to even my S2, much less my S3.
If Asus hadn’t cheaped out on the internal storage, their tablets would be a lot better.
Sent from my Asus Infinity
Not seeing any of that on my Toshiba AT300.
I hate to be a stickler, but “Wayne” is Batman’s last name. Otherwise, thanks for the info.
Lol, sorry. Brain drain.
if this is indeed accurate, maybe Tegra 4 will be right up there with the best this time. Best thing about the Tegra processors has always been the Tegra optimized games, not the performance of the processors.
If they keep their gaming partnerships up I will likely stick with Tegra based devices for a while yet.
Technology updates are a vicious cycle….
There is NO such thing as “future-proofed” in tech, it’s already obsolete before it ever goes on sale.
You sire are thinking a few years ahead in regards to more commonly accepted theories. Give it 5-8 years and tech will be outdated in 2-3 months from initial release to the public.
you SIR (no e) are thinking in another world. As tech continues to push on, it will be less revolutionary and just evolutionary. There are only a handful of breakthroughs that happen within a 7-10 year block of time in the tech industry outside of that it’s just evolutionary. in 5-8 years we will still have the same cycle, just with different hardware.
Obsolete does not mean “anything that isnt most powerful thing on the planet,” its reserved for things that cant run certain apps because its too old.
If you care about gaming and good hardware codec support Tegra is the only way to go
If you care about gaming and good hardware support Playstation and XBOX are the only way to go.
If you care about gaming and good hardware support PCs are the only way to go.
If you care about great tacos I know an awesome place to go…I mean…TABLETS!
Tegra devices have been my preferred choice for playing games. Wonderful graphics and fluid gameplay.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Their GTX 6– series was supposed to be many times better than the fermi. It was only a bit better.
Are you serious? The 6 series is friggin fantastic. Are you not looking at gaming benchmarks? Most games it has a pretty significant lead. BF3 shows a 40-50% FPS incease… only a bit better?. The 6 series is also leading to the GK110, which I hope makes it to the consumer market.
But can your eye see 40-50% FPS better? At what point does it become pointless?
Nvidia, Offer to write all of their firmware code and do all of the Radio and Chipset work.
Thats what Qualcomm does.
Take a look, Qualcomm has written like 15% of the standard code for Android.
nvidia mobile = meh
6 times the performance? Or 6 times the number of cores? The little known truth is that the Tegra 3 has a 12-Core GPU. So while the iCult was crowing about the “quad-core graphics” of the iphone/ipad (even though it’s CPU brain was only still dual-core), NVIDIA’s GPU had 3 times the number of cores. Since the Tegra 4 will have 72 GPU cores, that is simply 6×12=72.
The REAL question is not how many cores have you got, but what boost is there in real-life graphics performance, heat management, and battery drain. What difference does 6 times the number of cores if you only get 1/3 more in performance?
The claim was both 6x the amount of cores (didn’t include that since it’s obvious) AND 6 times the performance.
Get real, I am not trying to defend iOS here, but one thing Apple devices got is GPU. They are literally the “alienware” of mobile devices in terms of GPU performance. No one gets close. Frankly, IDK why nobody uses the powerVR chips found in iOS devices on android.
I think Apple bought Imagination tech, the company behind PowerVR chips. But the TI SOCs have PowerVR GPUs as well. U r right. No one can beat the GPUs in Iphones.
I think there are two reasons
First, PowerVR is expensive–in terms of IP licenses and silicon. Look at the size of the A5X here, it’s enormous!:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5685/apple-a5x-die-size-measured-16294mm2-likely-still-45nm
Second, general purpose compute power appeals to a much wider consumer market than graphics capability. The diminutive percentage of the smartphone/tablet market that plays high end mobile games really supports that configuration. Speeding up the web browser will sell more devices than a glbenchmark score. Besides, mobile game developers are still targeting the iphone 4 (not 4s, look at Gameloft’s MC4) so none of that extra GPU power is being put to use anyway.
Tegra 3 does NOT have 3x the number of cores as iPad3rdGen (A5X). Nvidia markets shader and pixel cores, which was 8 shader and 4 pixel. All in ONE CORE GPU. Apple’s A5x had 4 real GPU cores. If we’re talking about shader/pixel numbers, Ipad3rdGen (A5X) had about 32 cores..
i’m not a ifan. wayne seems to be seprated into 3gpu cores, or they can put all 72 shader/pixel cores into ONE GPU core. not sure what they will do. Wayne should be able to spank Apples A6X. however, i’m hoping the power envelope will still be sufficient.
usually AOI (all in one) anything is a bad idea. The performance lags due to the integration.
Be interesting to see how it compares to S4 Pro and the Exynos 5. Tegra SoC have always been lackluster but maybe they will have hit this one right
Maybe. I gauge the market by watching what the latest, greatest phones are using.
Clearly Qualcomm S4+ is going gang-busters and Samsungs’ Exynos has been a champ in just about every generation.
NVidia’s getting the leftover table scraps, ST-Ericsson seems doomed, TI’s leaving mobile and MediaTek has the cheapest end of the market wrapped, almost exclusively in “Asia”.
The GPU is 6x faster! Not the “chip”.
All I’m thinking about is the new transformer packing this beast of a processor!
nexus 7 with this chipset
for 199 bucks im buying
Stop hating on NVIDIA, they come out with the slightly weaker chipset than everybody else, but they come out with it 3-6 months ahead of everybody else. S4 Pro might be the best processor out there right now but, hey it came out over 6 months after Tegra 3. Lets see if anyone can take the crown from PowerVR in terms of GPUs (for some reason only found in iOS devices, and surprisingly no android OEM included them).
I wonder if they are mixing up number of cores with number of stream processors. IIRC, this is their first unified shader smartphone GPU. 75 might not compare to the 12 core GPU in the tegra 3 in the way that we think it does. No doubt it’s faster though.
6x more powerful graphics, I’ve got to see the games made for this beast
It’s hard to bring Tegra 3 to the masses?
Maybe they should implement some LTE support so it’ll actually get sold in the US. If you don’t have LTE a carrier isn’t going to sell your phone (unless it’s T-Mobile) here.
Elsewhere, maybe.