GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

CES 2010 Recap - Tegra 2
Posted in Gamer PC | January 25, 2010 10pm

One of the coolest things announced at CES was NVIDIA's Tegra 2 platform. Tegra 2 is NVIDIA's second attempt at a applications processor SoC (system-on-chip).  It's made up of a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores, an OpenGL ES 2.0 enabled graphics engine, audio decoder, video encode/decode hardware, image processor and an ARM9 core to manage the whole thing.  NVIDIA views the smartphone as its biggest opportunity for Tegra 2.Unfortunately, at the time of CES there weren't any smartphone designs ready for NVIDIA to show off.  Instead all we got were tablets powered by Tegra 2.While NVIDIA promised market-leading 3D graphics performance out of Tegra 2, the claims are difficult to verify until I have hardware in hand.  What I do know however is that a pair of Cortex A9s running at up to 1GHz should be significantly faster than any other ARM based SoC on the market today.The advantages are numerous.  Cortex A9 is ARM's first out-of-order microprocessor architecture.  With a shorter pipeline and an out-of-order execution engine we can expect to see much better performance per clock out of A9 than we ever had out of A8.  Even the 1GHz+ Cortex A8 designs floating around today are no match for an A9.  Most SoC makers are focused on bringing A8 to 45nm this year and will save A9 for 2011.  If that pans out, then NVIDIA will be left alone as the fastest ARM based SoC maker for much of 2010.A single A9 is pretty powerful for an ARM core, but the fact that the first versions of Tegra 2 ship with two A9s will mean a lot for multitasking on smartphones.  Launching multiple apps or switching between them while doing normal phone-things will just be faster thanks to the second core.NVIDIA also appears committed to a yearly cadence with its Tegra line.  We may see an update to the SoC next year.Anything that pushes ARM based SoC performance further is fine by me.  The SoC market could use another competitor (or two) that are very performance focused.  Now the real question is whether or not there will be any good phones based on Tegra 2 this year.

NETBOOK PC PC : DISCUSSION

Pine Trail Arrives, Masses Unimpressed?
Posted in Netbook PC | December 21, 2009 10am

CES came a little earlier than expected for netbook and nettop fans, Intel unveiled Pine Trail in December instead of at CES.  It looks like Clarkdale and Arrandale will be center stage at CES instead.I had the opportunity to test the desktop/nettop version of Pine Trail, the new Atom D510 with its NM10 Express Chipset.  Performance on average improved by between 5 - 10% across the board; the platform is noticeably faster than the previous dual core Atom 330.  In fact, on the desktop, Pine Trail is faster than NVIDIA’s Ion in anything that doesn’t require H.264 decode acceleration.
I include the caveat because Pine Trail includes no support for H.264 decode acceleration, yielding a significant feature advantage to Ion.  Intel’s solution is to encourage vendors to use a 3rd party H.264 decoder chip, similar to what’s used in Blu-ray players.  Unfortunately those solutions don’t appear to accelerate Flash video, so Pine Trail still comes up a bit shorthanded.

Atom 330 (left) vs. Atom D510 (right)
Power consumption is down quite a bit as well.  The NM10 Express chipset uses a lot less power than the old 945GC used on the first Atom based nettops thanks to the memory controller and GPU core moving onto the 45nm CPU die.While performance improves a bit on the desktop/nettop side, the netbook version of Pine Trail - the Atom N450, isn’t quite as impressive.  We tested ASUS’ EeePC 1005PE and found that it didn’t offer any tangible performance benefits over earlier Atom N280 based netbooks.  The advantage in the netbook space is all power though, we found the 1005PE could deliver around 10 hours of useful battery life on a single charge.Intel currently limits Pine Trail to single core only in netbooks, that means you’ll have to make a choice between battery life and performance in your next netbook.  Pine Trail will give you a long battery life but it’s still a slow single core design in netbooks.  ASUS’ recently announced EeePC 1201N combines a dual core Atom with NVIDIA’s Ion chipset.Then again you could always go CULV and have the best of both worlds.

NOTEBOOK PC PC : DISCUSSION

CULV: A Better Atom Alternative?
Posted in Notebook PC | December 10, 2009 9pm

CES is around the corner and as I mentioned in my last post, I’m expecting to see the next-generation of Intel’s Atom processor there; codename: Moorestown.  Both nettop and netbook flavors of Moorestown will be on display and while performance will be better than existing Atom platforms, I’m still not expecting much out of it.  In my eyes (and Intel’s), the Atom processor delivers a level of performance sufficient for a $299 or cheaper machine. What we saw throughout much of 2009 is upward movement of Atom system prices, particularly in the netbook market.  Until recently, it seemed as if netbooks didn’t have a price ceiling.Intel quietly fixed that with the introduction of its consumer ultra low voltage (CULV) Core 2 Duo CPUs.  These are specially binned Core 2 Duos that can run at lower than normal voltages and thus consume less power than normal.  As a result, they can be used in smaller than normal systems and/or deliver longer than normal battery life.Both of those features sound like characteristics of Atom based netbooks. The only difference here is most CULV processors are much faster than Intel’s Atom, particularly the single-core variant found in most Atom netbooks.CULV notebooks start from $400 and extend beyond $800 in price, but they’re definitely an alternative to Atom if you want a better performer. At AnandTech we published our holiday mobile buyer’s guide and listed a bunch of our favorite CULVs.  A bit more expensive than most, but ASUS UL80Vt is one of our favorite CULVs:

Thus far CULV uptake has been slow, but we need a good high performance, not much higher cost alternative to Atom.  If CULV is what it takes, I’m fine with that.  Expect to see more CULV based notebooks at CES next month.

NOTEBOOK PC PC : DISCUSSION

CES 2010: My Expectations
Posted in Notebook PC | November 25, 2009 10am

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I strongly dislike CES.  I’m all for gathering of products and companies, but there’s generally more mess and less actual usefulness at CES.  The show is too huge, the locale is too Vegas, and for the most part trying to find out information about a product is difficult unless you know about it ahead of time.That being said, I’m headed for CES at the beginning of January and here’s what I’m expecting to see.I’ve talked about both Arrandale and Clarkdale, Intel’s first dual-core Nehalem based processors for mobile and desktop respectively.  I’m expecting to see lots of both at the show and hopefully a good number of Arrandale based notebooks on display as well.

Arrandale
Both of the ‘dales bring graphics onto the CPU package and down to Intel’s 45nm manufacturing process, which should result in lower platform power consumption.  Performance is going to be the biggest advantage of the ‘dale family.  If you’ve been waiting to upgrade your notebook, this is going to be the chip you will have been waiting on.Pine Trail is next up from Intel at the show.  The second generation Atom processor, codenamed Pineview, brings graphics and the memory controller on die.  The latter which should improve performance for the in-order Atom core.  It’s not just notebooks you’ll be waiting for, if you’ve been thinking about a netbook you’ll want to wait until after CES.It’s not all about processors though, I’m expecting to hear a lot from NVIDIA at this year’s CES.  There’s been a lot of talk of 2010 being the year of Tegra, and what better way to kick it off than with a press conference at CES?  I’m hoping to see some more Tegra based devices other than the Zune HD (hopefully some Tegra 2 based platforms), but that may just be wishful thinking.Of course there will be the usual arrangement of TVs, digital media appliances and other gadgets at CES, but new CPUs and new SoCs are what I expect to be some of the highlights of the show.