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"The Verge Interview: Nvidia GM Mike Rayfield on Tegra 3 and LTE"
Reply to: by Draiko
The Tegra 3’s GPU outperforms the S4’s Adreno 225. Tegra 3 devices are almost 5 months old now and the SOC itself was sampling to OEMs a full year ago.
The CPU in the S4 is a modded A8 that performs better than the A9 but worse than an A15 (about 3.3B DMIPS vs the A9’s 2.5 and the A15’s 3.5).
The kicker is power efficiency.
nVidia’s 4+1 approach is more power efficient since pushing per-core clockspeeds up higher requires an increasing amount of power (power:clockspeed isn’t 1:1 when increased). Throttling up two Krait cores to 100% load for 5 seconds will use more power than throttling the Tegra 3’s 4 A9’s to 50% or 60% load for 6 seconds to perform the same task. The LP core in the Tegra also helps conserve quite a bit of power when the device isn’t doing demanding tasks compared to other SOCs. Using one throttled-down Krait core draws more power than the 500 mhz LP core in the Tegra 3. The highest-end apps are almost always games where the GPU plays more of a role than the CPU. The Adreno 225 in the S4 generally loses the GPU battle so the Tegra 3 would come out on top there as well most of the time.
That’s why you’re seeing the Asus Transformer Infinity S4 version clocked at 1.5 ghz while the Tegra 3 version is clocked up to 1.6 ghz. while getting the same performance and battery life out of the same 25 whr battery.
The N+1 core approach is also being used by ARM itself (A15 + A7 cores). They call it big.LITTLE processing.
This is all based on the info available on these devices so far. We’ll have to wait for some real-world device tests to see if any other factors come into play.
We’ll see the S4 hit along side the Exynos 5250. The OMAP 5 will hit about a month after that and the new Tegras will hit a month or two after that (with two versions of the Tegra 4, one with 4 A15 cores and one with 8.).
The S4’s REAL advantage is that it includes the wireless radios. Instead of paying for wireless radios (like LTE) AND the SOC, OEMs just buy the S4 SOC with the wireless radios included for less from Qualcomm. Samsung will always use their Exynos SOCs no matter what so nVidia’s Tegra 3 is looking either more expensive or more “involved” to implement.
Reply to: by Draiko
The Tegra 3’s GPU outperforms the S4’s Adreno 225. Tegra 3 devices are almost 5 months old now and the SOC itself was sampling to OEMs a full year ago.
The CPU in the S4 is a modded A8 that performs better than the A9 but worse than an A15 (about 3.3B DMIPS vs the A9’s 2.5 and the A15’s 3.5).
The kicker is power efficiency.
nVidia’s 4+1 approach is more power efficient since pushing per-core clockspeeds up higher requires an increasing amount of power (power:clockspeed isn’t 1:1 when increased). Throttling up two Krait cores to 100% load for 5 seconds will use more power than throttling the Tegra 3’s 4 A9’s to 50% or 60% load for 6 seconds to perform the same task. The LP core in the Tegra also helps conserve quite a bit of power when the device isn’t doing demanding tasks compared to other SOCs. Using one throttled-down Krait core draws more power than the 500 mhz LP core in the Tegra 3. The highest-end apps are almost always games where the GPU plays more of a role than the CPU. The Adreno 225 in the S4 generally loses the GPU battle so the Tegra 3 would come out on top there as well most of the time.
That’s why you’re seeing the Asus Transformer Infinity S4 version clocked at 1.5 ghz while the Tegra 3 version is clocked up to 1.6 ghz. while getting the same performance and battery life out of the same 25 whr battery.
The N+1 core approach is also being used by ARM itself (A15 + A7 cores). They call it big.LITTLE processing.
This is all based on the info available on these devices so far. We’ll have to wait for some real-world device tests to see if any other factors come into play.
We’ll see the S4 hit along side the Exynos 5250. The OMAP 5 will hit about a month after that and the new Tegras will hit a month or two after that (with two versions of the Tegra 4, one with 4 A15 cores and one with 8.).
The S4’s REAL advantage is that it includes the wireless radios. Instead of paying for wireless radios (like LTE) AND the SOC, OEMs just buy the S4 SOC with the wireless radios included for less from Qualcomm. Samsung will always use their Exynos SOCs no matter what so nVidia’s Tegra 3 is looking either more expensive or more “involved” to implement.