|
With Mobile World Congress on tap for next week, two processors will step to
front and center: NVIDIA's Tegra 3, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4. Let the
specsmanship and benchmarking begin.
The Tegra 3, already in the ASUS Transformer Prime tablet and launching in a
phone with the HTC One X, has everyone's attention, and it will show up in a
lot of devices. With 4 ARM Cortex-A9 cores, with one capable of running at 1.4
GHz and the other 3 at 1.3 GHz, it packs plenty of processing potential.
The Snapdragon S4 is rumored
to be the part in the HTC Ville, and we're all but certain to hear more
announcements next week. It features 2 "Krait" cores, which to the casual
observer doesn't sound like much.
But "Krait" isn't a core to be taken casually. It's not a Cortex-A9 or
Cortex-A15, but something in between. It's a heavily customized ARM core
Qualcomm created that launches three instructions per clock instead of just two
as in the Cortex-A9. Each of the two cores in the MSM8960 runs at up to 1.5
GHz, and there's a lot of clock and voltage scaling going on to save power when
things aren't at full speed.
NVIDIA has suddenly taken notice, and is turning on the marketing engine.
They're introducing the term 4-Plus-1
architecture. There's actually a 5th processing core, optimized for low power,
that keeps things going while the four full-power A9 cores wait for something
to do. Along with the CPU cores, NVIDIA's ULP GeForce graphics engine (wth 12
cores) leads to a claim of 3x the performance of the Tegra 2.
Read the Whole Article
| 
