Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 67 posts

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#21

Post by marshray »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #9
jitl wrote: post #2

Nvidia will save us from Intel in the long run. Intel just doesn't get multi-core processors.

Ok, that made me chuckle. Intel absolutely understands multi-core, what they don't yet 'get' is third party access to the inner works. Its interesting to watch nVidia because they have been on the receiving end of that sort of squeeze (front side bus patents and all that) and so they tend to lean toward that as a strategy, whereas other ARM processor houses don't seem quite so focused on locking down all of the silic…

I'm not sure LTE is much more than a no-brainer for anything handheld going forward from Q3. Somehow it seems the Nexus 4 ended up with two (or possibly even three LTE) implementations on the circuit board and it's not even an advertised feature.

If US carriers insist on locking down 4G LTE onto expensive multi-year contract subsidized devces, Intel may not have to worry for another generation. So the real wildcard here is, I think, T-Mobile.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#23

Post by mtgx »

mariusmg wrote: post #22

The "72 cores" is marketing drivel . The stream processors found in GPUs are not general purpose and certainly not equivalent to a cpu core. This number of cores remarks started to remind me of the gigahertz race between Intel, Amd and Cyrix back in the days.

I don't think they ever claimed or even misled people into thinking those are 72 CPU cores - even at the event. I think pretty much everyone knows they're talking about GPU cores, and not just to say that "we have more GPU cores than you do", but to compare to their previous "12 GPU core Tegra 3". Besides, they were talking about the 4 Cortex A15 cores all the time.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#24

Post by marshray »

frozenport wrote: post #17
jitl wrote: post #2

Nvidia will save us from Intel in the long run. Intel just doesn't get multi-core processors.

Wow! If Intel doesn't get multi-core I wonder how well a design firm that makes chips designed for the rendering pipline fair? What kind of load balancing does CUDA offer? Didn't they implement recursion a few weeks back? Scalar stream processor smacks of the Cray 1. Intel's lack of understanding has enabled it to catch 75% of market share. 2 years ago Intel demonstrated their understanding by increasing clock-speed…

Intel gets multi-core for desktop and server just fine. It's mobile devices and graphics where they have been consistently behind.

There are some (specialized) types of computation for which parts made by AMD/ATI and Nvidia are greatly superior. That Nvidia and other ARM licensees have completely taken over the fast growing mobile device market with efficient multicore CPUs with integrated GPUs is really significant to Intel.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#26

Post by OmarIsmail »

While a somewhat valiant effort from a specs/control perspective, I think this is going to be a pretty big flop. Primarily because it doesn't have much of a market, which means that they won't be able to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue.

There's a reason why the main gaming console manufacturers also have large development studios as well. Every new gaming device needs a killer app to launch it past the critical mass where it becomes economically beneficial for outside developers (3rd parties) to also release software for said platform.

nVidia doesn't have game studios (that they've announced anyway) so they're going to be relying on the broader Android gaming developers. However, Android developers are going to be targeting the hundreds of millions of phone/tablet Android devices and not unknown number of Shield owners.

So if very few developers are going to take the development resources to make games that take advantage of the Shield then how many gamers are going to want to spend the kind of money this will cost, when there are MANY other great alternatives (E3 this year will see the announcement of PS4 and the next Xbox).

If the hardcore gamers aren't going to be purchasing this system, then that leaves the so-called casual gamers. However, by definition this thing is targeting hardcore gamers so it doesn't have much appeal to casual gamers at all. Which means there's a very narrow market segment that is seriously interested in this.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#27

Post by PieSquared »

ricardobeat wrote: post #20
frozenport wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made my postmodern sense tingle! I have noticed more and more cameras implementing automatic color correction resulting in orange people and color changes while filming the same scene. I think HDR looks unnatural.

HDR can look as natural as you want. You're probably thinking of burnt-out crazy over-saturated flickr shots like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yury-prokopenko/3561920871/ligh... Or this (beyond terrible): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nik-on/4624961812/ But that's the photographer's fault. HDR is just a way of compensating for lack of dynamic range in a sensor. Used correctly it should make the image more real,…

Although I completely agree with your point - that HDR is a tool, and can be used for both high and low quality shots - I actually really like the second example you gave for what "bad" HDR looks like. It seemed like an artistic use with a rather gorgeous result to me. Your main point stands, though.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a photographer, and the only thing I know about photography is what I learned in college computer vision courses and overheard from friends.)

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#28

Post by ChuckMcM »

wmf wrote: post #15
ChuckMcM wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, that made me chuckle. Intel absolutely understands multi-core, what they don't yet 'get' is third party access to the inner works. Its interesting to watch nVidia because they have been on the receiving end of that sort of squeeze (front side bus patents and all that) and so they tend to lean toward that as a strategy, whereas other ARM processor houses don't seem quite so focused on locking down all of the silic…

I would say Intel/Infineon is ahead of Nvidia/Icera. At least the Infineon baseband has had some design wins.

That's an excellent point. Makes me wonder if there is an AMD ARM part with a Radeon GPU and some wireless implementation in our future. Seems like all the cool kids are building this particular kind of chip. It almost feels like the old 8080 days where everyone had a kinda-sorta the same 8 bit MCU to throw at the emerging PC market.

It is certainly going to be an interesting decade.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#29

Post by mtgx »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #26

While a somewhat valiant effort from a specs/control perspective, I think this is going to be a pretty big flop. Primarily because it doesn't have much of a market, which means that they won't be able to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue. There's a reason why the main gaming console manufacturers also have large development studios as well. Every new gaming device needs a killer app to launch it past the critical ma…

Nvidia has good relationships with a lot of game developers, and they've created the Tegra Zone store, for which the developers optimize their games (well for the Tegra chips). As long as they keep optimizing them for Tegra 3 and Tegra 4, the Shield should have plenty of games - certainly more than any new console, which usually have like 15 games at launch. Not to mention these games are a lot cheaper than a typical console game - literally an order of magnitude cheaper.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#30

Post by gonzo »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #9
jitl wrote: post #2

Nvidia will save us from Intel in the long run. Intel just doesn't get multi-core processors.

Ok, that made me chuckle. Intel absolutely understands multi-core, what they don't yet 'get' is third party access to the inner works. Its interesting to watch nVidia because they have been on the receiving end of that sort of squeeze (front side bus patents and all that) and so they tend to lean toward that as a strategy, whereas other ARM processor houses don't seem quite so focused on locking down all of the silic…

INTC + RF = 0 still holds
Post reply on HN