1. EETimes – Nvidia leapfrogged rival Qualcomm by showing a working version of its next-generation Tegra, a four-core mobile processor. The demo at the Mobile World Congress, described in an Nvidia blog, came one day after Qualcomm said it will ship a quad-core Snapdragon in early 2012.
Nvidia’s Kal-El chip was demonstrated running in an Android tablet. It can support up to 2,560 x 1,600 pixel resolution and 1,440-progressive video thanks in part to a 12-core graphics unit on the chip that also supports 3-D audio.
Overall power consumption, meanwhile, won’t be greater than Tegra 2, Phil Carmack, Nvidia Senior VP said. “Basically everything you can do on Tegra 2 is lower power on [Kal-El,]” he said.
The Kal-El chip delivers five times the performance of the current Tegra 2, Nvidia claimed. The company rated the processor at 11,352 on the Coremark benchmark, significantly above the Intel Core2Duo T7200.
Nvidia also revealed a road map of annual upgrades planned for the Tegra line out to 2014. The next generation, called Wayne, delivers nearly ten times the performance of the Tegra2 in 2012 and is followed by Logan in 2013 and Stark in 2013 hitting nearly 100x the Tegra2 performance.
Nvidia said it is sampling the part now and it will be in production in August.
Qualcomm said Monday its quad-core chip, called Krait will hit data rates up to 2.5 GHz. Nvidia did not reveal data rates or other details for its future Tegra parts.
In November, Marvell announced a quad-core ARM chip, the Armada XL aimed at servers and other data center systems.
Qualcomm Krait processors, which will still be called Snapdragons will be targeted at a 28-nm manufacturing process technology.
it expected Krait to achieve 150 percent higher performance at 65 percent lower power consumption than currently available ARM-based CPU cores.
Krait Snapdragons are being designed in single-, dual- and quad-core versions and are set to include an Adreno GPU series with up to four 3D cores, and an integrated multi-mode LTE modem, Qualcomm said.
The single-core is the MSM8930, the dual-core is part numbered MSM8960 and the quad-core is the APQ8064.
All the chipsets in the family will integrate a quad-combo of wireless connectivity including WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and FM as well as providing some support for near field communications (NFC) and stereoscopic 3-D (S3D) video and photo capture and playback.
The Adreno 320 quad-core GPU delivers similar graphics performance to today’s latest game consoles, but for mobile devices, Qualcomm said. In addition, the chipset family will support 3D and S3D games, capture and playback of S3D photos and videos, and output in full HD to a 1080p flat panel display over HDMI.
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