Quad-Core Smartphones: Nvidia Tegra 3 Details

So, we have talked about ‘Single-Core’ and ‘Dual-Core’ smartphones and tablets. You might be thinking ‘These are soooo Yesterday!! Tell us something that we don’t know’. Well, I’ll oblige by telling you that 2012 will be the year of ‘Quad-Core’. Yes!! You heard it right!!! Most of the market leading SoC manufacturers will come out with their ‘Quad-Core’ creations in the next year and these SoCs will have performance that is multiple times their previous generations’.

If you would have followed this blog closely, you might have seen the mention of two devices: the ‘Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime’ and the ‘HTC Edge’. Both will be sporting an ‘Nvidia Tegra 3’ (Project Kal-El) CPU which is, as you rightly guessed, a quad-core processor. I have also highlighted about the display panels used in both of them in ‘The Display Dilemma’ blog posts below: a ‘Super IPS+’ panel in the ‘Transformer Prime’ where as an ‘SLCD-2 optically laminated display’ in the ‘HTC Edge’.  So, they both have industry-leading displays and also processors. So expect these to get sold as fast as cakes. The ‘Transformer Prime’ will be hitting stores next month and the ‘HTC Edge’ will make its presence in Q1 2012.

So, let’s get down to the actual dirt: the ‘Nvidia Tegra 3’. The ‘Nvidia Tegra 3’ is, as you rightly expected, a successor to the highly successful ‘Nvidia Tegra 2’ and ‘Tegra 3’ has received a significant performance boost over the ‘Tegra 2’. Nvidia has detailed that the Tegra 3’s processor is 5 times as fast as the Tegra 2’s and the Tegra 3’s GPU is 3 times as fast as the Tegra 2’s. So, let’s find out how this is possible!!

Tegra 3 has got 4 ARM Cortex A9s (a step up from the 2 ARM Cortex A9s in Tegra 2) and therefore has got its name as the ‘Quad-Core’ SoC.  Nvidia actually had a surprise for the general audience when it announced the ‘Tegra 3’ SoC. It not only had the above mentioned 4 ARM Cortex A9s (which can run at a maximum clock-speed of 1.3 Ghz when running simultaneously and at a maximum clock-speed of 1.4 Ghz when only one of them is active), but also had another ARM Cortex A9 clocked at a lower frequency of 500 Mhz. So actually, ‘Tegra 3’ has got not 4 but 5 cores. The reason for including an additional ‘Companion Core’ (ARM Cortex A9 at 500 Mhz) was simple. Normally, when you increase the cores on the SoC, it tends to draw in more power which leads to loss of battery life. Most basic tasks like ‘Playing Music’, ‘Editing a document’, ‘Checking e-mails’ etc. do not require the power delivered by 4 cores. So utilization of 4 cores in such scenarios would be pointless. Nvidia thought that they could take care of these tasks with the ‘Companion Core’ and let the other ‘Quad Cores’ come into picture only when the applications demanded it. For example, if you are trying to watch a HD video or trying to play a game on your TV by connecting your smartphone or tablet to it, the performance of ‘Quad Cores’ is required. So in such scenarios, the ‘Companion Core’ would quietly hand over the control to the other 4 cores. So, as you would have got by now, at any point of time only one of them would be active: either the ‘Companion Core’ or ‘The other Quad Cores’. This type of functioning has been branded ‘Variable Symmetric Multi Processing (vSMP)’ by Nvidia. I remember using such terms to impress my professors while taking exams in MBA. ;-)

Right. The other major difference between the Quad-Core processor cores in Tegra 3 and the Dual-Core processor cores in Tegra 2 is that each of the cores (in the Quad-Core architecture and not the Companion Core) is equipped with a ‘Media Processing Engine’ (MPE) part. This MPE part is absent in the dual-core CPUs of Tegra 2. This MPE not only will allow users to watch any video in any format but also will support voice recognition.

Nvidia claims that it has been able to significantly improve the battery life of the smartphone or the tablet using such architecture. The other important thing to be noted is that even the GPU has 12 cores. But the actual meaning of ‘Core’ in a GPU is different from that of a ‘Core’ in a CPU. The only thing to be remembered is that the GPU in ‘Tegra 3’ is clocked at a higher frequency and delivers more performance than the GPU in ‘Tegra 2’, which will allow you to play games, that necessitated a graphic card in your laptop or desktop, with consummate ease.

So that is it about the CPU and the GPU of Tegra 3 SoC. At the time of writing this post, I have also got to know that 'Lenovo' and 'Acer' also planning to come out with their Tegra 3 offerings very soon. Looks like 'The Transformer Prime' won't be alone after all. Stay tuned..!!!