Discussions

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.