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Kal-El info

R

rakez

Junior Member
any news on the new nvidia chip? last i remember it was supposed to show up in august in new tablets. wondering if i should wait for Kal-El to get a tablet or just get a galaxy 10.1.
 
It's supposed to show up sometime 4Q from the latest news that I've heard. I don't know how quickly it will be used in a well designed tablet, so the first devices that ship with it might be on the substandard end of the stick. It's also going to be using Cortex-A9 cores, so it may be more beneficial to wait until designs based on the Cortex-A15 start shipping as the speculated performance increase will be 40%, not even counting the faster clock speeds.

Personally, I'd get a Transformer, if anything, now. Either way, I don't think the Tegra 3 is going to be all that great, especially considering it's being made on a 40 nm process and it won't be too much longer until we see 28 nm chips.
 
Mopetar said:
It's supposed to show up sometime 4Q from the latest news that I've heard. I don't know how quickly it will be used in a well designed tablet, so the first devices that ship with it might be on the substandard end of the stick. It's also going to be using Cortex-A9 cores, so it may be more beneficial to wait until designs based on the Cortex-A15 start shipping as the speculated performance increase will be 40%, not even counting the faster clock speeds.

Personally, I'd get a Transformer, if anything, now. Either way, I don't think the Tegra 3 is going to be all that great, especially considering it's being made on a 40 nm process and it won't be too much longer until we see 28 nm chips.
Click to expand...

Kal-El (Tegra 3) will have double the cores (Quad core) with 20% higher clocks (1.2G) and a faster iGPU than Tegra 2.

Latest news put pads with Tegra 3 to launch in October

I dont expect Tegra 4 (Cortex-A15) before Q2 2012 and products could be late as of summer 2012.
 
On the one hand, single-core for mobile seems fast enough (to me). On the other hand, a hypothetical Kal-El slate will have more cores than my laptop...

(And according to nVidia, more throughput too. Though they were cheating! 😛)


Seriously though, OP I would only wait if you don't need it now/want to wait for prices to drop. As others have said, since it is using A9's still, singlethread performance won't increase that much, which is most important in these situations anyway. I'm not sure what people intend to do with these quad-core tablets, although I have heard people talking about how they wished they could put things like Stata and SAS on them... Crazy!
 
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rakez said:
any news on the new nvidia chip? last i remember it was supposed to show up in august in new tablets. wondering if i should wait for Kal-El to get a tablet or just get a galaxy 10.1.
Click to expand...

Your thread is fine, as is, here in the CPU forum, but you may find yourself inundated with more posts and a wider spectrum of responses of you request to have thread moved to the Mobile Devices & Gadgets sub-forum.
 
If atom and C-50 are discussed in this section . a NV SOC should be a welcome addition . I personnelly will likely get a NVsoc @ 28nm .
 
AtenRa said:
I dont expect Tegra 4 (Cortex-A15) before Q2 2012 and products could be late as of summer 2012.
Click to expand...

Yea that gonna be a monster, but it will release in 2 parts next Fall.

"The first build will be a quad-core design at 1.5GHz built on the ARM Cortex-A15 and a 24-core GPU. Power consumption should be on the level of the current-generation Kal-El Tegra 3 SoC.
Wayne's second build, however, is almost jaw-dropping, given its purpose is for mobile devices. The build will feature eight ARM processing cores and 32-to-64 GPU cores. Each will be DirectX 11+ compliant and even support OpenGL 4.x, OpenCL 1.x and PhysX."

Mabe Nvidia will also release a refresh of the Tegra 3 on 28nm?
An eight core Tegra 4 with 64 gpu cores would make a monster portable gaming machine cpu/gpu!
 
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I'd be surprised if they bothered refreshing and making a big deal of it on 28 when they have other parts to replace it. They may shrink it for customers who for whatever reason still want to use Kal-El.

I am really impressed with Nvidia's aggressive roadmap for Tegra over the next 3-4 years.
 
AtenRa said:
Kal-El (Tegra 3) will have double the cores (Quad core) with 20% higher clocks (1.2G) and a faster iGPU than Tegra 2.

Latest news put pads with Tegra 3 to launch in October

I dont expect Tegra 4 (Cortex-A15) before Q2 2012 and products could be late as of summer 2012.
Click to expand...

The number of cores aren't terribly important for most applications, so that's largely irrelevant. A lot of the common workloads for tablets is offloaded to dedicated hardware on the SoC whenever possible as it's much more efficient than using the actual ARM cores. Switching to an A15 on a better process will lead to significant performance improvements. Supposedly A15 is upwards of 40% improvement, clock-for-clock. A 28nm process will allow it to be more power efficient as well.

Even though it may launch in October, it will probably be a long while before it's include in any flagship products. The Tegra 2 was available long before it actually made it into any tablets worth buying. The first products to actually ship with a Tegra 2 were terrible even by the standards of the time it launched.

I don't know when Cortex-A15 products will be available, but I'd bet money that Apple will use the newer design in their next SoC for their next iPad. Assuming no one else beats them to the punch and they keep their same schedule, they'll be launching early 2Q 2012.

The GPU improvements will be welcome, but outside of a few applications, they won't be terribly useful. I don't think the performance increase will be worth the wait, and with better chips in flagship tablets coming out in 2012, I think the Tegra 3 is in an uncomfortable middle ground.
 
The only negative thing about Kal-el is that its rumored to be 40nm "only".

A month or so after its out, competitors will have dual core 28nm chips, that are FASTER (than the quad core kal-el) and use less power. And 28nm Quads that will most likely spank Kal-el's 40nm behinde.
 
Arkadrel said:
The only negative thing about Kal-el is that its rumored to be 40nm "only".

A month or so after its out, competitors will have dual core 28nm chips, that are FASTER (than the quad core kal-el) and use less power. And 28nm Quads that will most likely spank Kal-el's 40nm behinde.
Click to expand...

They may be lower power and faster, but there will be a ridiculously limited supply of them for about 6-9 months after 28nm is first released.

Nvidia is going for volume availability and low-cost. TSMC will have gobs of 40nm capacity, yields will likely be 2x that of 28nm, and the cost/wafer will be 20-30% lower than a 28nm wafer.

Say what you will about Nvidia but Jensen took that company from an idea to a multi-billion dollar business that put the likes of S3 and Matrox out to pasture. If anyone knows how to break into a pre-existing established marketspace and out-compete the status-quo companies it is Jensen.

(AMD sorely needs a Jensen, or a Steve Jobs, or a Larry Ellison)
 
Arkadrel said:
A month or so after its out, competitors will have dual core 28nm chips, that are FASTER (than the quad core kal-el) and use less power. And 28nm Quads that will most likely spank Kal-el's 40nm behinde.
Click to expand...

Tegra 3 (Kal-el) will be released in September and first products will be released in October.

You will not see a 28nm ARM SoC before Q2 2012 and that will give Tegra 3 a nice 6 month advantage over the competitors (Tegra 3 will be the only quad core ARM SoC @ 40nm).

And as IDC have said, 28nm will be more expensive with lower yields/supply than a 2 year old mature 40nm process in TSMC, making Tegra 3 cheaper and massively available.

Tegra 4 will be a 28nm ARM Cortex A-15 SoC and i believe its coming 6 months after Tegra 3 (Well that was the first plan).
 
Idontcare said:
(AMD sorely needs a Jensen, or a Steve Jobs, or a Larry Ellison)
Click to expand...
.

The United States Marine Corps needs Larry Ellison, Idontcare... That guy is scary as hell.

On the original topic, I could see the future of most offices being something like Kal-El systems in a VESA mount for the backs of monitors. 802.11n, DP/HDMI, power... done. Apple could sell a tiny system which is powered off of sends power to a monitor via a thunderbolt cable, which chains to the monitor. I have a small server which runs on PoE, so why not? I HATE Apple, and I would buy that from them in a heartbeat.

nV's CEO getting into ARM's space could very well revolutionize a lot more of our future than we give thought to, because that's just it: nVidia wouldn't be as stong without JSW, and Apple would still be chasing bankruptcy without SJ. Are they both douches with Kim-Jong Ill/Jim Jones comparisons... of course. What AMD needs is a Fuhrer who will make the trains run on time: I nominate Ellison.

Daimon

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AtenRa said:
Tegra 3 (Kal-el) will be released in September and first products will be released in October.

You will not see a 28nm ARM SoC before Q2 2012 and that will give Tegra 3 a nice 6 month advantage over the competitors (Tegra 3 will be the only quad core ARM SoC @ 40nm).

And as IDC have said, 28nm will be more expensive with lower yields/supply than a 2 year old mature 40nm process in TSMC, making Tegra 3 cheaper and massively available.

Tegra 4 will be a 28nm ARM Cortex A-15 SoC and i believe its coming 6 months after Tegra 3 (Well that was the first plan).
Click to expand...

I'd guess if Tegra 3 shows up in Sept, products in October. That Nvidias Tegra 4 quad core 28nm device will show up about the same time as their competitors dual core devices. See where this is going? Like the late 1990s early 2000s graphics card market all over again.
 
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