Charbax has a hands-on with the Tegra 3 reference tablet:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baXzD1CNIrw

Nothing terribly exciting, but the presentation isn't terribly good and the screen glare is horrible, so it's tough to make out details of what is actually going on.

Lots of news for this thread today.

To kick it off, Engadget has a hands-on video of the Kal-El reference tablet and gives a good showing of the 'ball' game as well as 'Lost Planet 2' running on Honeycomb:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/02/n...ands-on-video/

What's cool is that Lost Planet 2 was coded for the PC using Unreal Development Kit, and that it only took a couple of months to port to Android .

While this may mean that many games will be ported to Android shortly, it's impressive that the Tegra3 can handle a low-end PC game with relative ease.

The next TI OMAP coming is the 4470, which is looking to be a very impressive SoC!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4413/t...-core-cortexa9

It features dual general-purpose A9-Cores at 1.8GHz, and a SGX544MP1! This thing should be a graphical monster, though it would have been nice to see additional cores on both the CPU and GPU.

I can't wait to see what the SGX544 is capable of...

It seems as if SoC makers are lining up to pledge support for Windows 8 running on ARM:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4411/w...otebook-demoed
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/06/qua...rsion-windows/

This includes Qualcomm and NVidia to start.

In Q2 2012, SoCs will officially have caught up to low/mid-end laptops of today in terms of performance. This makes it possible to run traditional OSs with great performance, but ultra-low power requirements (think all-day battery), instant sleep/wake, and ultra-thin profiles.

MS is wise to this trend and forging ahead with Windows 8 in an effort to capture some of the new market, but they will have added competition in the space from Google (Android/ChromeOS), Apple (OSX/iOS), and MeeGo.

Here's a Linaro presentation demonstrating 3 development boards across 2 platforms. Featured is the Quickstart (I.MX53) w/ Ubuntu 11.04, the Pandaboard (OMAP4) w/ Ubuntu 11.04, and the Origin Board (Extynos 4210) w/ Android.

The video showcases low-level demonstrations of various graphical operations (eg. video, composting, simple 3D)

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6objpoz4LQ

A bit dry, but still interesting to see a strong effort to move forward with software on ARM and reducing time-to-market all around.

This is probably one of my favorite designs/SoCs: The Zii labs ZMS.

Featured in the video below is the ZiiLabs ZMS-20 and the Jaguar Dev board:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ljSkCgEV-U

This is certainly a SoC designed by GPU engineers. Amazing!

What's so interesting about this architecture is the amazing array of 48 'stem cell' cores coupled to a dual-core A9 running at 1.6GHz. These 48-cores can be used in traditional OpenGLES applications, or can be general purpose with OpenCL, making for a potential powerhouse of a platform. I say potential because I have very few details on the 48-cores, and there is a software gap that needs to be filled to get to this performance.

The basic specs on the cores is that in aggregate they can handle a peak of 36GFlops of power , but that figure is somewhat meaningless as I doubt complete saturation situations are realistic for real-world situations.

The video demo featured honeycomb running, and it was running like hot butter. They also showed a set of filters being run over a live camera feed -- impressive stuff. Of course, it's hard to get a handle on the capabilities without some more specific examples.

I would *love* to see a shader saturated OpenGL demo with the cores being used. The beauty of the stem-cell concept is that the cores are completely general and infinitely configurable, meaning that hardware efficiency can literally be programmed via software.

For example, a shader heavy game can at run-time provision more cores to shader tasks, and less to game logic or physics. Additionally, 10 cores can be responsible for game logic, whilst the remaining 38 are handling rendering.

Additionally, this opens the door to literally program things like tessellation (a 'next gen' chipset technique for improving visuals) without requiring that the die provisions these characteristics in silicon. Amazing.

Even performance can scale in weird wild ways with software updates rather than hardware! The name stem-cell was appropriately chosen.

To say that this chip has the potential to run rings around the current competition is an understatement. 48 cores is a lot of parallelism, and fully programmable cores can mean big things for performance.

But here's the problem: very few developers are leveraging OpenCL and I'm guessing even fewer still are willing to develop for this exotic hardware that has yet to gain traction.

If I were ZiiLabs, I would produce an OpenGL driver that did run-time core provisioning to handle graphical tasks. This would make it instantly relevant and allow developers to take advantage of the hardware without changing their development toolchains. I would also include some demos of things that normal chipsets would choke on -- eg. ray-tracing and tesellation. I would also create an OpenCL library that could work in sync with this to rapidly provision cores based on the saturation of the task.

Lastly, I would produce an OpenCL OSS forum (or something) to share code and get developers working on this. As of right now, only the PVRSGX543 with the USSE2 engine and this chip are the only SoCs (AFAICT) that support OpenCL, which is a MAJOR advantage in the mobile world looking to eek out every drop of performance.

Additionally, the ZMS-40 has been announced (and demoed) which doubles the A9 cores, and 'stem-cell' cores to a whopping 4 CPU, 96 stem cell units . I can only imagine what's possible on this behemoth.

Fark.. I'm so interested in this hardware. I'm excited to wet my beak developing OpenCL applications, and this chipset is a godsend. I sincerely hope that they are able to gain some semblance of traction. A single high-profile demo featuring their silicon could change the industry.

I'd love to get more specifics regarding the efficiency of the SC cores. I wonder if they can handle instructions with SIMD.

To close, here's a promotional video:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2yv9WqOZL4

Here is a video of OpenCL demos displaying the performance across the ZMS-08.
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvk6t4Vs66M

I'm not sure how the ZMS-08 compares to the ZMS-20 or even the ZMS-40. It seems that there's a different CPU and memory interface, though I'm sure there are other differences as well.

The performance is very impressive. The ray tracer runs quite quickly over the stock C implementation on this single A8 core machine (some 8 times faster). These numbers will improve with faster cores and faster memory access.

I would love to know the performance of individual stem-cell cores...

TI talks the OMAP4470 superchip.

http://newscenter.ti.com/Blogs/newsr...ce-716621.aspx
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DSAjGK-To4

Dual Core 1.8GHz. Impressive, though I would have loved to see more piplines for the graphics processor, and a faster memory interface.

It's clear that their aim is convergence starting with this chip. I'm curious to see what types of devices will feature the SoC.

ARM is now diving into Intel's territory... quickly... NVidia, Qualcomm and TI have thrown their hats into the ring. Any other takers?

TI's OMAP5 processor has been unveiled, and it's a scorcher:

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtb...Other+PR+omap5
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_wwgTMcGXI

It seems that TI was integral in developing the ARM Cortex-A15, which gives them an impressive jump on the competition.

The two SoCs are the OMAP5430 and OMAP5432, which seem to differ in their memory interface (LPDDR2 and LPDDR3), package size, and imaging features. They both feature dual Cortex A15 cores with sub Cortex M4 cores running in parallel to offload tasks to when running in low power mode -- hyper cool. All on a 28nm process.

These chips will scale to an impressive 2GHz, and I'm expecting that they will give low end Intel CPUs a serious run for their money. An ultra-thin, ultra-light ultra-cool, and ultra-cheap laptop/tablet combo with instant-on, instant-sleep, and days of battery life, is sounding mighty tempting.

TI Claims that the A15 will deliver 50% general performance increase at the same clock as competing A9 SoCs while consuming 15% less juice. Add to that TI claims a dual-core A15, will handily outperform a quad-core A9 (presumably at the same clock).

They also tote a couple of PVR SGX544, which seem to have 2 pipelines based on their performance notes (5x vs 2.5x performance of the OMAP4470 which presumably has the MP1). These chips should be quite competent with the latest 3D content which rival current-gen consoles. PowerVR has been the performance leader in this space for quite some time.

Here's something that's interesting: the Cortex A15 will handle virtualization as standard feature. This is interesting in that the enterprise server market is SURE to jump on this technology as it is far cooler, far more power efficient, and far cheaper than intels offering in the server space. Virtualization will allow for multiple isolated OS instances to run on a single chip, which is very common for hosts (eg. Amazon AWS EC2). Those individuals that use linux and don't mind a re-compile of their server app, or individuals that wrote in Java are sure to benefit from this new operating environment!

This is also when the mobile SoC collides with the traditional desktop CPU. The difference is that this processor will sip less than a Watt in normal usage, whilst maintaining the performance necessary to do 'content creation'. I personally think that the A8's were sufficient for content creation, but I understand how inefficient typical desktop applications are.

Sampling for this wonderful SoC will start soon, if it hasn't already, with the first devices slated to land in the summer of 2012.

I don't know if it makes sense to hold out for that Tegra 3 (presumably at the end of this year)! This beast is sure to eat its lunch mere months after its launch.

I can't wait to see what Qualcomm comes up with. Can the MSM8960 compete?

In this post, Qualcomm talks about the asynchronous cores in the MSM8660.
http://armdevices.net/2011/06/02/qua...computex-2011/
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAemoivm30

By running asynchronously, these cores can run at different frequencies and thus scale power usage based on load, saving battery life.

Very cool.

I really like some of the moves that qualcomm is making.

BTB, the game in the background is called ilomilo and has great graphics and a fresh style. You can find out more about snapdragon 'optimized' titles here:
http://gaming.qualcomm.com/