Today NVIDIA is finally taking the wraps off their Tegra 3 system on chip and the gear-heads among us are going absolutely nuts. Now yes, shoving four cores on a chip that’s meant for smartphones and tablets will indeed offer some outstanding performance, but at what cost? The Tegra 3 was supposed to be manufactured using a more advanced 28 nanometer process, meaning it was supposed to take up less space on a motherboard than the Tegra 2. For reasons that haven’t been revealed to us, NVIDIA decided that they’re going to launch the Tegra 3 using the same 40 nanometer process that’s currently used to make the Tegra 2 chip. What does that mean in the real world? To quote Anand Lal Shimpi, the Godfather of everything silicon:
“Die size has almost doubled from 49mm^2 to somewhere in the 80mm^2 range. NVIDIA will eventually focus on improving per-core performance with subsequent iterations of the Tegra family (perhaps starting with Wayne in 2013), but until then Tegra 3 attempts to increase performance by exploiting thread level parallelism in Android.”
In other words the Tegra 3 is essentially a super sized version of the Tegra 2 instead of something new and innovative. That begs the question, who exactly is going to deliver the goods if NVIDIA basically fumbled the ball for their 2012 portfolio? Qualcomm. Last month they unveiled their upcoming S4 class of processors that are: A) Built on a 28 nanometer process B) Can be used in a single, dual, or quad core configuration C) Support damn near every single wireless standard on the planet D) Can be clocked at over 1 GHz faster than the Tegra 3, and finally E) Each Qualcomm designed “Krait” core is up to 30% faster at the same frequency compared to the equivalent ARM Cortex A9 core in the Tegra 3.
If and when HTC announces the world’s first quad core phone, it’s going to rock a Qualcomm processor. I’m absolutely sure of it.
Update: Charlie Demerjian’s 1200 word article on what’s wrong with the Tegra 3 is an absolute must read; key quote:
Numbers seen by SemiAccurate show a dual core Qualcomm Krait SoC absolutely destroying a 1.5GHz Tegra 3, these are real tested silicon, not estimates.