Tegra 3: A Look Inside

The latest and greatest Tegra chip.

On Tuesday, NVIDIA officially announced the latest iteration of their mobile processor platform, Tegra 3 (previously known by the code name “Kal-El”), the predecessor of which has powered all of the Honeycomb tablets released since the Motorola XOOM. The specifications of the new platform are quite impressive, with an ARM Cortex A9 CPU supporting up to four cores with a clock speed of 1.3 GHz (or a single core with a clock speed of 1.4 GHz). The platform’s support for volatile memory is also improved, with the maximum capacity raised to 2GB, and supporting DDR3-L 1500 or LPDDR2-1066 memory. The part many people are probably the most interested in when talking about an NVIDIA product, though, is the 3D capabilities it brings to the table. Tegra 3 doesn’t disappoint, with a 12-core Ultra-Low Power GeForce GPU up to three times the performance of Tegra 2, as measured by GLBenchmark 2.0 Egypt. That’s nothing to scoff at, right there.

So let’s talk about that quad-core processor. Firstly, quad-core isn’t exactly the right term, as NVIDIA has implemented a new multiprocessing technology with Tegra 3, called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP), which entails the inclusion of a fifth “companion core” in the processor package. This fifth core is created using a different process resulting in a processing unit which is extremely energy efficient at lower clock rates, and, as such, is clocked at 500 MHz (at higher clock rates, the process used to manufacture the companion core results in the core’s efficiency dropping, hence the low rate compared to the primary cores). The implementation of vSMP means that when a device is in standby mode, or is being used for lightweight workloads (NVIDIA names background tasks, audio, video, email synchronisation and social media synchronisation as examples), the primary cores will be shut down so that the low-power companion core can handle these tasks. As soon as the workload increases to a level that would begin taxing the companion core, the platform will automatically switch over to executing on the primary cores (when the primary cores are active, the companion core is completely shut down). This mirrors NVIDIA’s Optimus technology used in laptop chipsets to automatically switch from a CPU-driven integrated graphics processor to a hardware GPU, giving you both efficiency and performance as the situation demands. According to NVIDIA, these changes result in up to 61 percent less power consumption, or up to 12 hours of battery-backed HD video playback.

The 12-core ULP GeForce GPU improves on Tegra 2′s version by adding support for 3D stereo (via an output port supporting HDMI 1.4a). The maximum resolution supported by LCD and CRT outputs is also increased to 2048×1536 and 1920×1200, respectively. The 3D support is provided by NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology, meaning OpenGL applications need not provide explicit code to support stereo output. The video engine the platform provides has also been improved to support H.264 video streams encoded at a bit rate of up to 40 Mbps. The imaging component of Tegra now supports a primary camera of up to 32 MP, with a signal processor capable of processing 300 MP/s. NVIDIA has released another demo showcasing the capabilities of the Tegra 3 processing units, and it’s quite impressive:

Of course, all of this does no good without an actual device, which is why ASUS have announced the Eee Pad Transformer Prime to succeed the Tegra 2-based Eee Pad Transformer. The Transformer Prime has a retail price of $499 for the 32GB model (or $599 for 64GB), and $149 for its signature keyboard dock accessory. At the time of writing, $499 is equivalent to about R4000, which is what the first Transformer’s 16GB WiFi-only cost at at least one South African online retailer. Keeping in mind that the MSRP of the original Transformer was $399, South Africans should look at about R5000 for the Transformer Prime’s entry model, depending on how ridiculous the retailers get with their mark-up percentages.

The Transformer Prime will be powered by the full quad-core Tegra 3 platform, and improves upon the formula set by its predecessor by slimming down the profile of the tablet even further, to a mere 8.3 mm. The 10.1″ 1280×800 Super IPS+ display has also been improved for outdoor viewing, according to ASUS. The launch model (which is expected to launch in early December) will not ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, but ASUS has promised an update to ICS to follow in short order. I’m inclined to believe them, as ASUS has a stellar track record in releasing updates for the original Transformer, which currently has an Android 3.2.1-based firmware.