I’ve not mentioned this on the blog before, although with my ear firmly pressed to the ground, I’d seen the demos and rumours, but me being me, I wanted to wait until some more concrete news popped up before talking about it. I’m talking the Nvidia Tegra chip, and since it’s now being reported by Mobile Crunch that the first Tegra-powered phone will hit shelves before the end of the year, now seems as good a time as any to tell you why I’m so excited.
Y’see, the Nvidia Tegra isn’t just a single chip. Consider something like the Snapdragon processor in the Toshiba TG01. Yes, it’s very, very fast, running at 1GHz. It’s easily the fastest mobile processor yet seen in a phone. But, like I say, it’s still just one CPU.
The Tegra isn’t; think of it more as an entire computer on a chip… a computer with eight separate processors, that is. There’s a couple of ARM processors on there, a sound processor, and two video processors, amongst other things. What that leads to is proper 1080p HD video playback, accelerated Flash support, for the full web experience, and of course, mind-bogglingly good 3D graphics (even in the interface itself), which should come as no surprise, given Nvidia’s graphics card pedigree. But, of course, with all that power, surely it’ll just sit there and eat batteries, right?
Well, apparently not, since Nvidia claim the Tegra draws less than 1W of power, meaning that as well as being hyper-powered, the damn thing’ll last for days and days between charges.
The Tegra’s been rumoured to be on its way into the market for some time, now, but today’s news gives us a couple more details of when it might come out, and crucially, who might be making it. The when is before the end of 2009. The who is a bit more vague, but Nvidia have confirmed it’ll be one of the big 5 manufacturers. The big question, of course, is which one of the 5 it’ll be.
Of course, whoever it is will be in for some serious business headed their way, I reckon, since our news section is reporting that shoppers are being advised to choose their phone on what processor it’s got…
Anyway… what follows now, is pure, out and out speculation. There is no factual basis for what I’m about to suggest… but it’d be awesome if it were true.
The Nvidia Tegra chip will play nice with both Windows Mobile and Android, and its clock speed is 750MHz. Oh, and also, it’s an ARM11-based chipset. Well, an upcoming WinMo phone immediately popped into my head when I read that, since it’s 1/ running on Windows Mobile, 2/ it runs on an ARM11 chip, and 3/ it clocks in at about the right processor speed.
Is it just possible that the Sony Ericsson X2 might actually be the first Tegra-powered phone?
Well, no, probably not, but it’s nice to dream.
And dream I will, especially about this video that shows off a custom interface the Nvidia team made, and the 3D graphics this beastie can run. And as you watch it, you may well have that moment where you realise the 3D graphics in the mapping/3D building simulation are being rendered on the fly, and get as excited as I did…
Er, wow…
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July 1st, 2009 at 2:46 pm
It’s about time mobile phones add multi-threaded cpus tbh. We’ve only been using them in laptops, netbooks and tablets for about 10 years >.>
The draw distance on the cityscape was pretty pathetic tbh, the PSP can render a million times more than that, which probably indicates it’s severaly lacking in video memory or that the gpu is slow as hell.
Not a mighty big leap but certainly something that a phone that’s looking to get into 3D and gaming apps needs. Another thing that’ll take them a couple of years to get ‘right’ imo, but a step in the right direction.