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Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#41

It's really a pity that Android makes it so difficult to get down to the metal on this hardware. If I want to take advantage of Neon intrinsics I have to use the NDK and write them by hand. On iOS I just use the Accelerate framework directly.

You have to have some limitations, it's not like every Android device can do NEON.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#42

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.

Well, 5 cpu cores, one is invisible to the OS though.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#43
Can't wait to see that chip in the Nexus 7 2 or however they brand it. Or maybe the Nexus 10 2? A15 cores are such a noticeable boost over A9.

I'm really hoping once this thing gets benchmarked that Nvidia finally hits it out of the park on the graphics side, for being the foremost GPU company of the last decade they sure screwed up ULP Geforce with 7000 series gpus from a decade ago. I think these are Kepler cores, and they have proven themselves fantastic on the desktop.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#44
post #41

It's really a pity that Android makes it so difficult to get down to the metal on this hardware. If I want to take advantage of Neon intrinsics I have to use the NDK and write them by hand. On iOS I just use the Accelerate framework directly.

You have to have some limitations, it's not like every Android device can do NEON.

Sure but that doesn't mean that couldn't be fewer hoops to jump through for the many devices that do. I have an iOS app that does realtime audio FFT without even breaking a sweat. I've considered porting it to Android but the degree of hassle puts me off it.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#45
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to have some limitations, it's not like every Android device can do NEON.

Sure but that doesn't mean that couldn't be fewer hoops to jump through for the many devices that do. I have an iOS app that does realtime audio FFT without even breaking a sweat. I've considered porting it to Android but the degree of hassle puts me off it.

Sure, it could be made easier, but i am wondering if it is done on purpose. Android encourages the developers to stay away from the NDK unless it's really necessary. Making it easier to build incompatible apps (= NEON) would surely mean more devs building incompatible apps even if not necessary and thus hurting the android ecosystem in general with more fragmentation.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be some helpers in the SDK in the likes of "if NEON is supported execute , else ".

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#46

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,…

HDR can look natural when used correctly, but if the camera's doing it automatically I bet we'll start to see lots of casual photographs abusing it.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#47
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but that doesn't mean that couldn't be fewer hoops to jump through for the many devices that do. I have an iOS app that does realtime audio FFT without even breaking a sweat. I've considered porting it to Android but the degree of hassle puts me off it.

Sure, it could be made easier, but i am wondering if it is done on purpose. Android encourages the developers to stay away from the NDK unless it's really necessary. Making it easier to build incompatible apps (= NEON) would surely mean more devs building incompatible apps even if not necessary and thus hurting the android ecosystem in general with more fragmentation. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be some helpers in t…

Perhaps but the unfortunate consequence is that there are entire niches of apps that flourish on iOS that don't really even exist on Android. Android is a great utilitarian OS but the really exciting stuff on mobile (IMO) needs to push the hardware hard.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#48
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it could be made easier, but i am wondering if it is done on purpose. Android encourages the developers to stay away from the NDK unless it's really necessary. Making it easier to build incompatible apps (= NEON) would surely mean more devs building incompatible apps even if not necessary and thus hurting the android ecosystem in general with more fragmentation. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be some helpers in t…

Perhaps but the unfortunate consequence is that there are entire niches of apps that flourish on iOS that don't really even exist on Android. Android is a great utilitarian OS but the really exciting stuff on mobile (IMO) needs to push the hardware hard.

What niche apps would that be?

I mean the same statement can be made for Android and Widget Apps, Homescreen Apps and whatever else is not possible on iOS. I doubt the amount of your niche apps is more then a fraction of those :P

P.S.: My point is, that there will always be differences in the available apps plainly because the API is not the same. I am wondering though, what apps can be done on iOS that can't be done on Android.

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#49

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.

I just want higher dynamic range screens.

here's a really good blog post on the topic http://19lights.com/wp/2011/11/14/will-hdr-displays-really-w...

Re: Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC

#50
Some cool stuff here. We've been shooting with RED Epic for a while now, and the extended dynamic range of the HDR-X mode is really nice. It's about 18 stops of dynamic range. I can pull almost anything out of high contrast scenes in post-production - we don't have to wait for the magic hour anymore and can generally wave goodbye to blown out skies. Check out londonhelicam.co.uk - there are a couple of HDR video examples in the reel.

I wonder if this Tegra 4 chip will have enough horsepower encode the extended dynamic range of the HDR video into a usable 16bit/32bit video format, at good quality bitrates. What codec would it use? h.265?

Sony has the best dynamic range in consumer sensors, hope there will be some products combining this into a truly usable and user configurable product - either in a phone or a consumer camera.

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