Nvidia Tegra CPU: "Tick, Tock" strategy?

[ocre]

It sounds like TSMC is trying hard to compete against Intel......

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/bl...log/2011/11/arm-tsmc-moving-fast-to-20nm.html



Some interesting points from the above blog:

1. 20nm is one year away as a production technology. Does this mean we could see mobile cpus built on 20nm a good deal earlier than 1H 2014?

2. 20nm is expected to deliver 25% improvement in power efficiency, 15-20% improvement in performance, 1.9 increase in density.

3. 20nm Fully depleted SOI is being considered as an alternative to Intel 20nm Finfet. It will be interesting to see if this FDSOI process technology on 20nm would allow ARMv8 to make the cut for smartphones?

Some more interesting points:

"For the time being, ARM's focus is on getting out Cortex A-15 on 28/32nm processes.

'We expect A-15 to be sampling in the first half of next year, to be in full production in Q4 2012, and to be out in hand-sets by the end of next year,' says Howarth. "


This sort of confirms what i have been predicting. Qualcomm's chips may be sampling soon, but they arent gonna be in devices for a while. More the reason why tegra3 is such a thorn in their side. It was a clever strategy from nvidia.

 

[cbn]

Some more interesting points:

"For the time being, ARM's focus is on getting out Cortex A-15 on 28/32nm processes.

'We expect A-15 to be sampling in the first half of next year, to be in full production in Q4 2012, and to be out in hand-sets by the end of next year,' says Howarth. "

This sort of confirms what i have been predicting. Qualcomm's chips may be sampling soon, but they arent gonna be in devices for a while. More the reason why tegra3 is such a thorn in their side. It was a clever strategy from nvidia.

You have to remember what is called Qualcomm's "Cortex A15" is not an actual Cortex A15....it is their own Custom CPU called "Krait". Therefore it doesn't follow the same rules and timelines as the vanilla ARM CPUs.

 

[TuxDave]

To just about everyone in the industry, this "report" was a laughable work of fiction, and it seemed like even the technology journalists of EETimes had been hoodwinked by their own ignorance of the industry into thinking the two (TSMC and Intel) efforts had anything to do with one another.

That was the first time I saw that article and man what a complete mess, lol.

 

[Eug]

Does anyone here have some links to basic crossplatform benchmarks comparing PowerPC, x86, and ARM? I'm just curious as to how well my quad-core Tegra 3 (Nexus 7) would compare to say dual-core G4 and dual-core Atom.

Yes I realize those benchmarks may be meaningless in terms of real-world performance, but I'm curious nonetheless.

BTW, for general usage my single-core G4 1.7 GHz feels painfully slow nowadays, but my quad-core Tegra 3 feels fast... running different OSes and different software of course.

 

[Arkadrel]

GPU comparison.

Thats old 🙂

Slightly newer:

Apple & Qualcomm > Nvidia Tegra's.

Nvidia has a strong brand, from its years with discrete GPUs.
So people know its name in phones too, but its really not as strong in the mobile scene as either Qualcomm or Apple are.