Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia officially took the wraps off of their next-generation mobile processors tonight. Originally announced back in February, the Tegra 3 processor – aka “Project Kal-El” – actually sports five cores, including a fifth “companion core” for low-power applications. Nvidia claims Tegra 3 will offer up to three times the graphic performance of current Tegra 2 dual-core processors with “up to 61 percent lower power consumption.” In lay terms, that means, “An industry-leading 12 hours of battery life for HD video playback,” according to company PR.
The first consumer device to ship with Tegra 3 inside will be the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet, a device shown off by Asus Chairman Jonney Shih a few weeks ago at the AsiaD conference. Transformer Prime also launched today, and will ship in time for the holiday season with a price point beginning at $499 MSRP in the United States. Meantime, leaked reports from earlier this week peg the HTC Edge as the first quad-core phone; if true, I’d expect an HTC/Nvidia coming out party at (or around) CES in January.
The obvious question here is, “Why quad-core? Why four – if not five – cores in my mobile device? What does this do for me?” The obvious answer is, of course, that four cores is two more than two. Duh. But let’s turn to the press release, anyway, for some specifics regarding what Tegra 3 can do for you. According to Nvidia:
- Tegra 3′s new 12-core GeForce GPU delivers more realism with dynamic lighting, physical effects and high resolution environments, plus support for 3D stereo
- Tegra 3 provides the “fastest web experience … applications … multitasking … [and] fastest, highest-quality gaming”
- the world’s first quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU
- New patent-pending vSMP technology, including a fifth CPU core that runsat a lower frequency and operates at exceptionally low power
- 12-core GeForce GPU, with 3x the graphics performance of the Tegra 2 processor, including support for stereoscopic 3D
- New video engines with support for 1080p high profile video at 40 Mbps
- Up to 3x higher memory bandwidth o Up to 2x faster Image Signal Processor
- The Tegra 3 processor redefines power consumption and mobile-computing performance with:
- The world's first quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU
- New patent-pending vSMP technology, including a fifth CPU core that runs at a lower frequency and operates at exceptionally low power
- 12-core GeForce GPU, with 3x the graphics performance of the Tegra 2 processor, including support for stereoscopic 3D
- New video engines with support for 1080p high profile video at 40 Mbps
- Up to 3x higher memory bandwidth
- Up to 2x faster Image Signal Processor
- 40 games are expected to be available by the end of 2011, and over 15 Tegra 3 games are under development for Tegra Zone, NVIDIA’s free Android Market app that showcases the best games optimized for the Tegra processor.
- The Tegra 3 processor is in production. Developers can order the Tegra 3 Developer Kit to create applications for devices with Tegra such as tablets and super phones, at developer.nvidia.com/tegra.
