NVIDIA recently unveiled their upcoming Tegra 4 SoC for mobile devices at CES 2013, which will have a quad-core ARM CPU and 72 custom GPU cores, giving it 6x more graphics power than the current Tegra 3. The Tegra 3 is already in use in a variety of mobile devices such as phones, tablets, and notably the Microsoft Surface RT. The Tegra 4 will unfortunately not have support for CUDA, but it is anticipated that a future Tegra will. See NVIDIA's site for more information on it.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
kailuo
Also note that Tegra 4 is one of the first SoCs that features quad-core ARM Cortex A15 cores on-board, which is a multicore ARM architecture processor providing an out-of-order superscalar pipeline ARM v7 instruction set. ARM has confirmed that the Cortex A15 core is 40 percent faster than the Cortex-A9 core (used in Nvidia's Tegra 3 SoC) with the same number of cores at the same speed. In addition, Tegra 4 continues the 4-plus-1(low power core) design, which efficiently reduces power without having to sacrifice performance.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
kayvonf
Question: We're getting way ahead of ourselves in the course, but can anyone describe what the "4+1" design that @kailuo mentions is, and why architects might have chosen to do that?
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
kailuo
The 4-PLUS-1 design is: in addition to the four main "quad" cores which handle the majority of high intensity computation, a fifth CPU core (the "Battery Saver core") is included onto the board. This core is built using a special low power silicon process that executes tasks at low frequency for active standby mode, music playback, and even video playback. Simply put, this fifth core exists to handle (mostly) background tasks (e.g. email syncs when your phone is in standby state) using much less power.
This comment was marked helpful 1 times.
kailuo
@Xiao you've worked on power management for Tegra 3, any insights?
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
atulitk
It is also interesting to note that the 5th "Battery Saver" core is OS transparent. i.e, the OS and the applications are not aware of this core but automatically take advantage of it specially during the active standby state (when the user is not actively interacting with the device).
By using a 5th core during the active standby state, the power consumption is minimized, therefore improving the battery life significantly.
Reference: The Variable SMP whitepaper.
NVIDIA recently unveiled their upcoming Tegra 4 SoC for mobile devices at CES 2013, which will have a quad-core ARM CPU and 72 custom GPU cores, giving it 6x more graphics power than the current Tegra 3. The Tegra 3 is already in use in a variety of mobile devices such as phones, tablets, and notably the Microsoft Surface RT. The Tegra 4 will unfortunately not have support for CUDA, but it is anticipated that a future Tegra will. See NVIDIA's site for more information on it.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
Also note that Tegra 4 is one of the first SoCs that features quad-core ARM Cortex A15 cores on-board, which is a multicore ARM architecture processor providing an out-of-order superscalar pipeline ARM v7 instruction set. ARM has confirmed that the Cortex A15 core is 40 percent faster than the Cortex-A9 core (used in Nvidia's Tegra 3 SoC) with the same number of cores at the same speed. In addition, Tegra 4 continues the 4-plus-1(low power core) design, which efficiently reduces power without having to sacrifice performance.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
Question: We're getting way ahead of ourselves in the course, but can anyone describe what the "4+1" design that @kailuo mentions is, and why architects might have chosen to do that?
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
The 4-PLUS-1 design is: in addition to the four main "quad" cores which handle the majority of high intensity computation, a fifth CPU core (the "Battery Saver core") is included onto the board. This core is built using a special low power silicon process that executes tasks at low frequency for active standby mode, music playback, and even video playback. Simply put, this fifth core exists to handle (mostly) background tasks (e.g. email syncs when your phone is in standby state) using much less power.
This comment was marked helpful 1 times.
@Xiao you've worked on power management for Tegra 3, any insights?
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
It is also interesting to note that the 5th "Battery Saver" core is OS transparent. i.e, the OS and the applications are not aware of this core but automatically take advantage of it specially during the active standby state (when the user is not actively interacting with the device).
By using a 5th core during the active standby state, the power consumption is minimized, therefore improving the battery life significantly.
Reference: The Variable SMP whitepaper.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.