Nvidia and Renesas's ARM SoCs, any takers?

[Dari]

Any takers so far for Nvidia's Tegra 4?. The product was announced. It looked promising and far more efficient than ARM's big.LITTLE but I've heard nothing since.

Speaking of big.LITTLE, Renesas also announced such a SoC in February, but with a more powerful PowerVR6 series GPU. It'd be interesting to see how it would compete against Samsung's SoC, provided there are any takers.

 

[dagamer34]

How is Tegra 4 more efficient than big.LITTLE? I don't see how a lower clocked Cortex-A15 core is more power efficient at tasks when the CPU is largely idling than a Cortex-A7. And in terms of die size 3.6 A7s fit in the same space as one A15 (source). Especially in multi-threaded tasks, I don't see how a lower clocked A15 is going to beat 4xA7s.

There's a reason why Tegra 4 went with the solution they did though, which was to take the knowledge they gained from the Tegra 3 instead of starting over from scratch with a big.LITTLE implementation. That and they hoped to get the chip out to market faster.

 

[lothar]

How is Tegra 4 more efficient than big.LITTLE? I don't see how a lower clocked Cortex-A15 core is more power efficient at tasks when the CPU is largely idling than a Cortex-A7. And in terms of die size 3.6 A7s fit in the same space as one A15 (source). Especially in multi-threaded tasks, I don't see how a lower clocked A15 is going to beat 4xA7s.

There's a reason why Tegra 4 went with the solution they did though, which was to take the knowledge they gained from the Tegra 3 instead of starting over from scratch with a big.LITTLE implementation. That and they hoped to get the chip out to market faster.

How well is that working?

 

[StrangerGuy]

The fact that there isn't a major design win for Nvidia despite the OMG benchmark numbers for T4 should raise a red flag.

 

[dagamer34]

How well is that working?

I didn't say they were successful at it, but that doesn't mean that a lower clocked A15 is better than 4xA7s. The two aren't related.

At this point, everyone is choosing Qualcomm because they were likely ready faster. But that doesn't mean it's more powerful. And in fact, the peak performance of Tegra 4 should beat even the Exynos 5 Octa which only clocks it's A15s at 1.2Ghz.

 

[dagamer34]

The fact that there isn't a major design win for Nvidia despite the OMG benchmark numbers for T4 should raise a red flag.

The fact it's not shipping in tablets where there is less of a power constraint leads me to believe it's just not ready yet and HTC wanted a new chip to ship ASAP early in 2013.