I wonder what the C++ Binary Arm of the Intel Dual Threading will do when it finally comes out next year? It's not long now until the source code of the A Series chips comes out, innit.

More Tegra 3 (aka Kal-El) goodness!


http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/05/nvidia-glowball/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4359/n...adcore-physics
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBvaDtshLY8

The demo shows very cool dynamic textured lighting on all pixels in a scene. That's quite impressive fragment performance! They mention that the physics are being handled by 4 cores. The video alludes that this work is being handled by the CPU cores rather than GPU shaders.

Asus is lined up to be a partner! Lets hope one of their recently announced devices are carrying this tech for release later on in the year.

Samsung has teamed up with Linaro to release an Exynos 4210 dev board:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/29/l...en-development

This may make a good alternative to the Pandaboard. The Exynos 4210 is a beast.

Qualcomm is making headlines with an imminent sampling of their new MSM89x0 SoCs, and promising a huge 75% decrease in power consumption on a 28nm fab:

http://androidandme.com/2011/05/news...5-lower-power/

We're talking up to 2.5GHz per core, and the new Adreno 320, which could give the Tegra 3 a serious run for its money.

The 'Scorpion' core design has been replaced by 'Krait', offering 65% power reduction from similar ARM designs.

ARM has a serious contender on its hands.

ARM is making bold claims this morning, projecting that they will take a whopping 50 percent of the mobile PC market by 2015. Considering that they basically have no foothold in the low/mid-end laptop market, that's a very aggressive claim:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/30/a...0-per-cent-of/

Intel should be slightly worried about this. Of course, intel has something that ARM doesn't, legacy application support via Windows. ARM has Android, MeeGo, Windows 8 on its side and potentially ChromeOS.

This race will likely come down to the software.

A rumor has it that Nvidia Tegra 3 devices will start appearing THIS FALL!

http://androidandme.com/2011/05/phon...let-this-fall/

Rumors are that both Motorola, Asus, and Amazon are in the running to produce the new devices.

Here is Epic Citidel running on an TI Omap 4430 w/ PowerVR SGX540 GPU:

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YfgteAvoPY

It's impressive that so much performance can be squeezed out of last gen's GPU. I'm curious to know how much of the CPU is being used in this demo. I'm guessing that the static nature of this demo has the GPU handling 99% of the tasks.

It's even more impressive considering that the iPhone4's SGX535 is capable of running this smoothly. Methinks that game developers haven't begun to take these chips to their limits.

I'm amazed to think of what the A5's SGX543MP2, or the Exynos 4210's Mali400MP4 can do seeing these visuals. These are true current gen GPUs capable of multiplying the performance of the SGX540. At the very least, in game effects could be multiplied with much more shader saturation over the entire scene.

Here is the same demo running on the SGX543MP4 of the Sony NGP:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHSkZbxjG3o
Notice the particle effects, rich shadows, and extended geometry of the non-player characters, far vanishing point, god rays, etc. Quite impressive.

It would be worth while for the chip manufacturers to hire some developers to create compelling demos to show off the power of these chips rather than dry spec sheets.

Thanks for the video.

Well it was obvious the powerhouse 540 had a lot of kick, but this is untapped potential in the Galaxy S devices (inclusing Galaxy Tab).
I think the Mali 400 is a fourway segmhented gpu (not a true quadcore) and due to its underclocking its only as powerful as the GeForce ULP (72something) found in the Nvidia T20 "Tegra2".

And we already know the SGX540 is slightly more powerful than the gpu in the Tegra2, so it really is a "current gen" gpu. I'd really like to see games like this enter the Android Market (not TegraZone), especially holding my fingers crossed for the Dreamcast emulator (if written in C++/OGLES2 ... should run decently on SGS/SGTab).

That presentation makes a mockery of Tegra "Kal-El" demonstration which is pushed fairly hard (>65%) and is supposedly x100 the performance of Tegra2... seems like only triple the performance to me.

edit: I was mistaken, Nvidia said Kal-El is only 5x the performance of T20 Tegra2. What I realize is that the Nvidia team made an error when naming their [internal] chips' names. It should follow as:
1) Wayne (Batman -not a superhero just a regular armed soldier/warrior).
2) Logan (Wolverine -incredible stamina, adamantium bone, self-healing ... slightly more deadly than Batman).
3) Stark (Ironman -impenetrable armour, flight, energy beam...an actual "Super"hero).
4) Kal-El (Superman -nothing can be more powerful than him because the author constantly increases/exhagerates his power every issue to the point of God).

Future runs?? Phoenix (Jean-Gray), Dr Manhattan (supernatural being based on the Hindu Primary-Pagan-God Siva), Gallactus (nuff said).

The marketing material it specifically lists Mali400MP as being scalable to up to 4 'cores'. I also recall reading that the GSII has the full 4, in the Exynos 4210 package. Regardless, in recent tests, Mali400MP blows the T20 GeForce ULP out of the water, in geometry, fill rate, and shaders. It is an impressive performer and one to be revered.

I have no doubt that the T30 will compete favourably with the Exynos 4210, thanks to the 4 CPU cores and added pipelines (12 cores in all, I believe), but the Mali 400 has a few tricks up its sleeve, that begin and end with tile rendering which greatly reduce memory bandwidth and overdraw. I believe that the Mali400 will be able to hold its own against the T30 GPU onslaught.

As an aside: The next GLBenchmark test 3.0 will render to an offscreen buffer, which means that we will get a taste of GPU performance that is not distorted by the screen that it is displayed on. A much more accurate comparison.

I think that NVidia's tegra has a great marketing campaign. Tegra is becoming a house hold name, and users (like yourself) are demanding it in their devices, but the SoC has yet to prove itself the clear performance champ.

That said, I have great faith in Nvidia and their aggressive iterative style, and have expectation that they will eventually take the lead.

But I agree, even the SGX540 hasn't seen its true potential, nor other SoCs, and without appealing these strengths to developers they will go untapped; developers will stick to the lowest-common-denominator, rather than maxing out these dormant beasts. They need to get their eyes off of engineering schematics and on to their customers.

Case in point: find me two demos of the Mali400MP GPU....

Apple pushes the A5's strengths, NVidia does the same for the Tegra, even Qualcomm is boasting about the very powerful Adreno, but Mali400 is a spec sheet on a single web-page.

Just to follow up my previous point with a non-scientific peek into GLBenchmark 2.0.

Check out the scores for some devices with Mali400 vs. Tegra. Remember the 'Pro' test is the easy one..

Relevent tests:
Galaxy SII (Mali400MP @ 800x480): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
Hardkernel Odroid-A (Mali400MP @ 1366x768): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
LG Optimus 2X (T20 @ 800x480): 800x480):http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
ATRIX 4G (T20 @ 960x540): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
Eee Pad Transformer (T20 @ 1280x800): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
XOOM (T20 @ 1280x800): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall

For fun:
Galaxy Tab (SGX540 @ 1024x600): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
Galaxy S (SGX540 @ 800x480): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
Iphone4 (SGX535 @ 960x540): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall
iPad 2 (SGX543MP2 @ 1024x768): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall

The number of pixels of the ODROID-A is roughly the same as the XOOM (~3% higher), but it performs way better. In some cases it quadruples the result -- which is significant. The ODROID-A has 30% more pixels than the iPad 2's 1024x768 resolution, though is outperformed by the SGX543MP2. I'm curious how large of an effect resolution has on performance of these devices as there is a difference between the GSII and the ODROID-A despite similar hardware but different resolution. This is where GLBenchmark3.0 will help as it can render to an offscreen buffer.

Now, I know, that this is just one benchmark and certainly doesn't tell the whole story, but it seems that the GPU tests featuring the Mali400MP put it very high in the running.

While the full test may give you a general idea, if you look at the low-level results, they tell another story regarding the various strengths of the GPU according to more specific GLBenchmark tests.

I'm not so quick to buy into NVidia's marketing hype around the Tegra 2. I would have loved to see the Mali400mp4 in the upcoming Galaxy Tab line of devices. I suppose there's still hope for the Tab 8.9.

Now the real trick is to get developers to code actual games for the GPU