Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset begins a new era of processing power. Scheduled to be launched in August-Oct, the new system-on-chip finally made its debut on Asus Eee Transformer Prime on Nov 9, 2011. The quad-core processors, in Tegra 3, have a surprise companion core that optimizes performance and battery-life for Tablets.
The core of Tegra 3
The developers of the Nvidia Tegra 3 have integrated the ARM architecture, the Graphics processes, memory controller and two other features into a single-system chip. This integration of several features brings better audio video performance at low levels of power consumption.
The Nvidia Tegra Core 3 or the quad-core chip project is also called Kal-El, after Nvidia’s penchant for naming its chips after comic heroes. Kal-El was the name of the comic hero Superman.
The Tegra Core 3 has four normal cores, similar to other quad-core processors. However, Tegra 3 differs, by way of addition of a ‘fifth’ companion core. While the four main cores are standard Cortex-A9s, the fifth core is made using ‘a special low power silicon process.
This dual composition of the cores means that when a Tablet is in the standby mode, only the fifth-core or companion core will be in running mode, while normal cores will be powered down to conserve battery-life.
For example, when background data is upgraded or while on music or video play modes only the fifth companion is running. Whereas the high-performance tasks such as Web browsing, gaming and multitasking, the companion core is disabled.
This is possible because of Nvidia’s new technology, pending patent-approval, the Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP). This moves the ‘running state’ of the Tablet from normal core, swiftly, to the fifth core.In comparison to Tegra 2, the new chipset saves almost 61percent on the power it consumes. Therefore, for the first time, batteries will survive twelve hours of HD video playback.
The 12-core GeForce Graphics Processor Units will deliver 3x graphical power and web browsing gains four times the earlier speed. The new chipset supports 1080p to 40Mbps video processing.
Another important factor on which Tegra 3 delivers is the automatic conversion of its 3D vision technology into OpenGL applications for Stereo 3D for 3D streaming on large-screen 3D TV.
First and Fast Features of Tegra 3
The Tegra 3 has several first and fast features-
Top quality Games-The highest gaming quality are available at the NVIDIA Tegra Zone app games. The list includes the Chidori, Riptide GP, Bladeslinger, Sprinkle, Shadowgun, Big Top THD and DaVinci THD.
In fact, 40 games including 15 Tegra 3 games as well as a free best games Android
Market app for Tegra processor.
Best Web Experinece- WebGL browsing, Adobe Flash Player 11 and HTML5 are optimized besides fast-paced Javascript engine.
Multitasking Optimized- Moving from one task to the next is easy and optimized
Applications use Optimized– Especially multimedia apps like photo/video editing is faster and optimized when the Tablet is running on Tegra 3.
The Tegra 3 for mobiles and other devices is expected to release in early 2012.
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Tablet features multitasking, multimedia and at the same time save up on the battery-life, thanks to the patent-pending Nvidia processor technology.
Tags: Asus, Gaming, Nvidia Tegra 3
