Tegra 3 - faster than Apple A5 and very energy efficient
The Tegra 3 (codenamed Kal-El) is NVIDIA’s first five-core chip that could conquer the world of tablets and smartphones. The company says the chip is capable of similar performance as the Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 mobile processor.
Similar to the second generation of Tegra, the SoC (System on chip) codenamed Kal-El is made with TSMC's 40-nanometer bandwidth technology. As a result, the engineer could not rely on lower consumption due to the lower bandwidth, however, energy efficiency was nevertheless significantly increased.
The Tegra 3 contains a total of five ARM Cortex-A9 cores. The clock of four processor cores can rise to 1,3 GHz at maximum load and 1,4 GHz on a single thread. They are basically high-consumption cores, so their energy efficiency can be considered low under lower load, but this is where the main screw comes into play. The chip's fifth central unit (Companion core) operates at low frequency and operating voltage, but is perfectly sufficient for smaller background tasks (e-mail synchronization, music playback). Thanks to the aggressive current gate, the main cores are completely switched off and only the auxiliary core operates, at a clock speed of up to 500 MHz.
When running computationally intensive applications, the auxiliary kernel shuts down and is replaced by the main kernels. Of course, even in this case, the chip activates itself step by step, which saves energy again. Switching is fully automatic, requiring minimal user intervention. The kernels use the 1 MB second-level cache, but the solution outlined above should not cause a cache conflict. NVIDIA has named the procedure the very sonic vSMP (Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing).
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According to the company’s presentations, the Tegra 3 could be up to four times faster than the dual-core Apple A8 SoC in some measurements (Google V5 benchmark). Of course, these performance metrics are worth treating with some caution, as the operating system also plays an important role here, but you can clearly see the advantage of the Tegra 3 over its rivals and that’s not all!
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NVIDIA also compared consumption compared to the previous generation solution. For optimal utilization, the Tegra 3's power consumption during video playback is 61% lower than that of the Tegra 2 and can operate for up to 12 hours. This is an outstanding result, but perhaps even more surprising is the fact that consumption has fallen even during computationally intensive games.
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A total of 12 processing units serve the chip. Again, based on NVIDIA’s measurements alone, graphics performance has tripled, which may have been strongly contributed by the fact that engineers doubled the number of pixel shader units. Although these values were not achieved in real conditions, the Tegra 3 is still more than twice as fast as its predecessor. Obviously, this requires programs written for parallel processing and various optimizations, but the acceleration can definitely be spectacular. Shadowgun, Riptide and Sprinkle already fall into this category. Programmers have taken advantage of high graphics performance in terms of image quality, such as twice as many particle effects in some games, or more realistic, spectacular physical simulations. To give a concrete example: Riptide features the well-known motion blur animation.
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Another interesting thing is that the Tegra 3 can already be used as a game console (support for wireless controllers), and it can also display 3D on suitable displays. It is not necessary to think only of games, as this technology also affects YouTube, as 3D content can be found there as well. According to the company, by the end of 2011, more than 15 games optimized for Tegra 3 will be developed.
Source: pcgameshardware.de
