Nvidia Announces Next Gen Tegra

[David Tucker]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/live-from-nvidias-ces-press-event/' target='_blank'>http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/...es-press-event/</a><br /><br /></div><p>Nvidia had their CES press event today and among the announcements were details on the next generation Tegra chip.&nbsp; The Tegra powers, among other things, the Zune HD and from everything I&rsquo;ve seen it&rsquo;s a very impressive chip already.&nbsp; The current Tegra runs the ARM11 chip.&nbsp; The new Tegra is going to be running the dual core Cortex-A9.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/wpt/auto/1262902101.usr307.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>They also said that there will be <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">8 independent processors so if I understand the transcript from Engadget correctly, that means 16 cores total on the new Tegra</span>&nbsp;(I didn't understand correctly. &nbsp;Thanks bitbyte for pointing out there are actually 2 Cortex A9 processors).&nbsp; All while only consuming 500 milliwatts.&nbsp; They claim this will allow for 140 hours of music and 16 hours of HD video but of course, that will depend on a lot of factors unrelated to the Tegra alone.</p><p>Nvidia&rsquo;s biggest announcement for Tegra is that it will be powering all Audi cars starting in 2011.&nbsp; I assume that means the 2012 model years but they don&rsquo;t specify in the live blog on Engadget.&nbsp; There is no mention of the Zune or other devices specifically but they do say there are 50 devices in the pipe for the new Tegra.</p><p>I think a combination of Tegra, Windows Phone 7, and the Zune all on one platform could make for a killer device.</p><p>Check out the rest of the <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/live-from-nvidias-ces-press-event/" target="_blank">live blog on Engadget</a>.&nbsp; They have other announcements involving 3D on our laptops, which I&rsquo;m sure everyone is excited about and lots of great pictures and slides from the Nvidia&rsquo;s presentation.</p>

[Craig Horlacher]

That's what I thought when I got my iMate Ultimate 6150. One of the reasons I chose it was because it had a GoForce 5500. WinMo support is terrible. It's pretty much useless having that GPU. It doesn't do anything for Windows Media Player. I did finally find a free video player that someone gave specific support for this gpu but other than that, all it gives me is an external vga out which is cool but I don't use it much.

It seems Windows Mobile has a history of not supporting custom hardware very well. I know other devices have come with graphics accelerators and couldn't use them for much of anything either.

It seems like the graphics chipsets that are good and being very well used in non-winmo devices (n1, droid, iphone) are all powervr based. Maybe microsoft should try that.

Microsoft may have figured out how to use the current one in the ZuneHD but I wouldn't trust them to get the WinMo version right after my experience.

[bitbank]

David,
The Tegra 2 has 8 subcomponents on the SoC, but out of those, there are 2 ARM Cortex-A9's for running applications and the rest are for graphics, memory and the radio.
L.B.

[David Tucker]

Thanks bitbank, I'll update the story. I couldn't really find any good specs when I was writing this up :)