By The other day, we learned Nvidia wanted to bring consumers a device worthy of taking full advantage of their very powerful chipset – the Tegra 2 line – and now we’re given the pleasure of seeing that vision realized on video. While Nvidia is being quiet on the device’s specs and features, we can see that it performs unlike any Android tablet that’s come before it.
One demo showed a simple – but good-looking – football game running smoothly in 3D, for the most part. I say ‘for the most part’ because there were a couple of hiccups and short freezes during the demo, but it’s likely this is just a prototype unit.
Some initial specs include 1GB of RAM, a 1GHz ARM Cortex 9 processor, a front-facing camera, and an 8.9-inch capacitive touch screen. This is a monster of a device and we hope there’s more to be seen from Nvidia regarding it very soon.
[via Engadget]
Wow….in my opinion Ipad is already dead! Bye Bye Steve!
Nice!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That hiccup is probably the garbage collector doing it’s stuff. Realtime applications are pretty difficult to make in Java, as you have absolutely no control over when garbage is collected. So rather than having a constant very small slowdown on your program, you sometimes experience complete stops in the flow as in this video. Good thing Google released the NDK!
I saw the device yesterday as well. It appears to be a bit thicker than the iPad, but I’ll be happy to get my hands on it.
This thing will be awesome with Froyo… 450% performance improvement over Eclair!
If you look at the hiccup, it coincides with the creation of a new character on the field (the defender). Might have been related to loading a new model.
When writing games in Java or other GC languages, you strive to allocate zero new objects during the processing of each frame of gameplay.
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If games are to be big, I hope Android has, or gets a GC that runs on a separate thread. Even better would be a real time GC. (Meaning every memory allocation is guaranteed to take no more than some specified maximum time.)
This tablet looks awesome. When it’s released and it’s not over priced, I’m getting one. :D