Tegra 3 vs Llano vs Sandy Bridge

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
169
106
I was just reading about Ouya, the upcoming open source Android based game console, and saw that it will be using a Tegra 3 chip from Nvidia. This got me wondering: what sort of x86 chip with on die graphics would be needed to match Tegra 3?

Low end Ivy Bridge hasn't hit the market yet, and Trinity has yet to hit the market for individual purchasing at all, so only the last generation Llano and Sandy Bridge chips are available for direct comparison and with the context of price. The cheapest processor Intel offers is the Celeron G530 which goes for $49.99 on Newegg, and AMD's least expensive choice is the A4-3300 at $54.99. How do these compare theoretically to Tegra 3?

All in all btw, I figured it would cost about 2 times the cost of Ouya ($110) to build a functionally equal or better PC.
 

Arkadrel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2010
3,681
2
0
From this thread:

Povray on ARM:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2251730




Exynos 4210 @ 1.2 GHz (Samsung Galaxy SII, ARM Cortex A9) (NOT A TEGRA 3, but a ARM CPU)
Debian 7.0, gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a9 -march=armv7 -mthumb -mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 30 seconds (90 seconds)
Render Time: 1 hours 20 minutes 38 seconds (4838 seconds)
Total Time: 1 hours 22 minutes 12 seconds (4932 seconds)

vs

Athlon II x4 (K10h), 2.8 GHz

gcc 4.4.5, -march=barcelona, -ffast-math -unroll-loops
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 1 seconds (1 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 16 seconds (16 seconds)
Render Time: 0 hours 13 minutes 23 seconds (803 seconds)
Total Time: 0 hours 13 minutes 40 seconds (820 seconds)
This is about the CPU vs CPU aspect.

a Athlon II does in 13minuets what takes a ARM CPU 1 hour and 22 minuets to do.
(single thread program, so its just 1 cpu core vs 1 cpu core)

Im pretty sure if you compaired the GPU inside the Llano/Trinity to a Tegra 3,
it would look the same or worse.

Tegra 3 is designed to not use that much power.
Llano comes in 100watt TPD, and would walk all over a tegra 3.

But your probably right it would cost alot more to design a Ouya with a Llano/trinity instead.
Might be worth it, though if the consol came out ~10 times as powerfull.
 
Last edited:

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,939
6
81
Tegra 3 is pathetic in comparison to even the lowest end Intel chip with integrated GPU. Not even worth discussing.
And you could build an Atom PC for less than twice the price I would think. Excluding OS of course. Atom wouldn't be that much better though than Tegra 3.
 

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
169
106
For the OS in my hypothetical cheap PC build I'm just assuming the use of something free and open source, like Ubuntu.
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,939
6
81
Celeron G530 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116409
ASRock H61 motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157315
2GB RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820220453
Crappy generic case with crappy PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811148047
60GB SSD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227811

Total price:
$183, or $173 AR.
(SSD is actually cheaper than a mechanical drive, since the cheapest mechanical listed on Newegg is $60, for a 750GB drive).
So around 50% more, since there is also a $10 rebate on the SSD. And it's *slightly* better than Ouya.

Shopping around, you might be able to get some things slightly cheaper, or find a cheaper HDD/motherboard/RAM elsewhere, or re-use old parts.
 

Fox5

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
5,957
7
81
Tegra 3 gpu might be on par with Intel's HD2000, but is probably slower than that still.