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Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

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Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#31

Post by nextparadigms »

ebiester wrote: post #18
nextparadigms wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not (much) more than a Tegra 2 running at 75% utilization. Each Tegra 3 core should run at 50-60% power consumption of each Tegra 2 core, if history is any guide. When every chip maker works on a new ARM chip generation, they try to increase performance while maintaining the same overall power consumption of the whole chip. You won't see an ARM chip with 1W TDP in one year, and 1.5-2W the next year, when the new gene…

Sorry... must... resist... can't! Moore's law has nothing to do with speed, only transistor count in the same space. While the speed increases are impressive, they're still picking off the low hanging fruit, as people haven't fully figured out how to optimize for the space yet. Kal-El will reportedly be using 40nm transistors, compared to the 22nm process Intel is able to do. Which means there's more room for the ama…

Intel won't have an Atom at 22nm until late 2013. By then Tegra 5 should be out, which who knows with how many Cortex A15 cores, at 28 nm. In 2014, ARM chip makers will move to 20 nm.

Intel's advantage is only of about 1 processing node generation, but that's not even for Atom right now. It's only for their highest end chips. Current Atom is at 45 nm, and it will move to 32nm next year, when ARM chips will be at 28nm. But this doesn't even matter anyway. Even if Intel was 2 processing nodes ahead, ARM would still be more efficient.

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#32

Post by nextparadigms »

tobylane wrote: post #8
kapitalx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means on the iPhone and iPad. Nvidia acquired PortalPlayer which was the chip used in the iPods, but Apple decided not to use them anymore and developed their own chip. Meanwhile PortalPlayer chips eventually became Tegra. Also due to a lawsuit that was recently settled with Intel, Nvidia was unable to provide Nehalem chipsets to Apple, meaning that Apple ended up shipping Nvidia's Core 2 Duo chipset, but that won…

Or Sandy bridge and a compatible graphics card.

Sandy Bridge is good compared to AMD chips, but it's overrated compared to ARM chips. ARM chips are still far ahead in power consumption. Besides Intel, won't even have a Sandy Bridge Atom by late 2013.

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#33

Post by sandGorgon »

daimyoyo wrote: post #23

My concern with this is heat. If you have 75% utilization in a mobile device, most turn into briquettes. They're impossible to hold. I wonder how NVIDIA plans to address that.

I think the problem space is different.

Power hungry processes and mobility are usually mutually exclusive and IMHO, they should be. The win in this case is not mobility, but portability

I envision that we will see Crysis on mobiles in a couple of years, but that will be in conjunction with a dock - which will not only connect the mobile to a HD display - but also keep feeding it power and optionally cooling it. When removed from the dock, the game will ideally switch to a low poly mode, where it no longer is gonna exercise the GPU+CPU to its max - thereby saving power.

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#36

Post by jc-denton »

daimyoyo wrote: post #23

My concern with this is heat. If you have 75% utilization in a mobile device, most turn into briquettes. They're impossible to hold. I wonder how NVIDIA plans to address that.

Why do you think they use multiple cores instead of a single fast one?

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#37

Post by wmf »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #29
gvb wrote: post #3

That means the simulations we're watching require a full quartet of processing cores on top of the 12-core GPU NVIDIA has in Kal-El. Mind-boggling stuff. Mind boggling indeed, but totally absent in the text and demo was any mention of power usage. Four cores running at 75% utilization plus 12 GPU cores is going to suck down a tablet battery in a hurry.

According to a salesmen at a Nokia booth after being asked the question: How about battery life? Battery life should increase. Because we have 4 cores, we can run them on lower voltages. So overall, our plans are, and we expect to have better battery life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhDmQCOyXrU The power consumption and battery life should be akin to the Tegra 2.

If you're doing one core worth of work on four cores and it's well-parallelized then you can run the cores slower. But in this demo they're running all the cores pretty busy, which will use more power.

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#38

Post by yason »

Funnily, my quad Intel Core i7 (two cores both with hyperthreading) couldn't play the 720p Flash video on YouTube smoothly...

Impressive stuff! The thing I paid most attention to was the way they had figured out at least some way of what to do with those ARM cores. Getting four cores running at 75% (no idea whether they were throttled at the time) means there's some serious work being done. The usual mobile graphics benchmarks don't stress the cpu side as much the gpu side so Tegra3 wouldn't gain as much by running existing demos.

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#39

Post by nightlifelover »

yason wrote: post #38

Funnily, my quad Intel Core i7 (two cores both with hyperthreading) couldn't play the 720p Flash video on YouTube smoothly... Impressive stuff! The thing I paid most attention to was the way they had figured out at least some way of what to do with those ARM cores. Getting four cores running at 75% (no idea whether they were throttled at the time) means there's some serious work being done. The usual mobile graphics…

it can, you are doing something wrong

Re: Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El demos next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (w/ video)

#40

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

gvb wrote: post #3

That means the simulations we're watching require a full quartet of processing cores on top of the 12-core GPU NVIDIA has in Kal-El. Mind-boggling stuff. Mind boggling indeed, but totally absent in the text and demo was any mention of power usage. Four cores running at 75% utilization plus 12 GPU cores is going to suck down a tablet battery in a hurry.

"Mind boggling indeed, but totally absent in the text and demo was any mention of power usage."

That is because NVIDIA is really bad with power usage. Like Intel, they are optimized(the graphic chips) for being faster and faster, not taking less power.

It is not so easy for them to change that. The same way ARM was created from scratch for mobile devices so was OpenVR (the graphic accelerator behind iPad and iPhone).

OpenVR started in the desktop developing low power graphic cards, I used one of them but NOBODY CARED back on the day. People do not care at all about the Nvidia card consuming 200Watts because power on the grid is cheap.

I guess they will make mobile devices for gaming with huge batteries and people that want high quality games will buy them.

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