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Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

arstechnica.com

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#32

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…

I think you read a different article than I did. The Ars Technica article doesn't mention the Shield at all, just the Tegra 4.

Anyway, it sounds like NVidia is putting out a device to show people what the Tegra 4 can do. They have to build prototype devices anyway; they might as well sell a few of them while they're at it. They're not expecting to create their own platform: the Shield is just useful for basically acting as a controller for your PC or as a box for playing Android games.

There's more to the market than "hardcore gamers" (how hardcore can you be using a portable device anyway?) There's the Windows 8 tablet and Android tablet markets, which NVidia would very much like to win. I also would not be greatly surprised to see an SoC like this in Steam's new box, either.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#33

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.

Take a look at the very first image right at the top of the article.

I never saw them mixing up the GPU and CPU cores. They have 4 CPU cores and they kept on saying it.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#35

Real-time HDR is great! Hope everyone gets in that bandwagon. At some point HDR processing should become part of the hardware pipeline in every sensor, and we'll simply have a selectable dynamic range.

Sony's Exmor RS sensor already has hardware HDR, and can take HDR videos in real time. They should ship with many of the high-end smartphones this year.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/20/Sony-Stacked-CMOS-se...

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#36
post #32

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…

I think you read a different article than I did. The Ars Technica article doesn't mention the Shield at all, just the Tegra 4. Anyway, it sounds like NVidia is putting out a device to show people what the Tegra 4 can do. They have to build prototype devices anyway; they might as well sell a few of them while they're at it. They're not expecting to create their own platform: the Shield is just useful for basically act…

Sorry, I got my headlines/articles mixed up.

The Tegra4 does indeed look quite stellar!

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#37
>In a side-by-side Web page loading test with Google's Nexus 10... Tegra 4-based prototype loaded a set of Web pages nearly twice as quickly... the Tegra tablet appeared to be running the stock Android browser, however, while the Nexus 10 was running Google Chrome

Scumbag Nvidia? I would doubt that either browser makes significant use of >2 threads, leaving most of the performance difference that was not due to the 200mhz clock increase explained by the different browser.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#38

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,…

I'm actually a photographer and I like the over-the-top HDR shots (even the example linked). It really depends on personal taste, and what it is you're after.

A lot of people dismiss them because they're "unrealistic" (which they obviously are) but I ask you is an oil painting unrealistic? For example this:

http://snapzlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Oil-Painting...

Clearly that is a painting, but if exactly the same picture was acquired using HDR everyone would dismiss it as being terrible?

My point is that you can use HDR to get realistic looking pictures, but you can also use HDR for "artistic" reasons, like painting using your camera. A lot of photographers are dismissive of the latter because they want to pretend photography is a practical rather than artistic endeavour.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#39

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.

The number of cores is not "drivel", and it's also not new. This kind of information is absolutely standard fare when talking about GPUs nowadays.

See for instance the (huge) tables at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_p..., under the "Config core" column you can see each model's configuration of cores.

You can see that the idea that a GPU has several types of core, and various amount of each, goes back 5+ years.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#40

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…

Android gaming is going to boom this year I think. The market is primed for mobile gaming to take off into more graphically intensive game territory, and the industry has been getting sized up for years.

And this is the Android gaming device. A controller that doesn't require a usb port or finnicky wifi / bluetooth. So that is its killer feature.

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