NVIDIA has in spite of its lack of DirectX 11 had a lot to talk about at CES. The graphics card maker has put a lot of emphasis on the Tegra 2 platform for handheld devices and now that we know more about the chip it’s easy to understand why. NVIDIA’s Tegra 1 platform was powerful, the Tegra 2 platform will be for times as powerful as the precursor and this System-On-a-Chip solution sport many mouthwatering specifications.
Tegra 2 is a SoC, a large chip containing everything you need to power a system. NVIDIA builds Tegra 2 on eight separate processors, compared to 7 with Tegra 1. It’s not just the number that has changed but also the performance and architecture.
Except from the video processor handling playback and recording of 1080p material it sports an audio processor, image processor and a new GPU that it was reluctant to mention much about today.
The trump is said to be the CPU cores that are based on the Cortex A9 architecture. A9 is the successor to Cortex A8 (Snapdragon) that performs so well with the latest smartphones. Cortex A9 is up to 25% faster the last generation, clock per clock. But NVIDIA has decided to thrown in two 1GHz Cortex A9 cores in Tegra 2, which effectively doubles the theoretic performance.
Tegra 2 will primarily be used in tablets and smartbook-like computers. Though we can’t help imagining the smartphones that are expected to use NVIDIA’s new SoC, which could result in something truly extraordinary.
As well written walkthrough of Tegra 2 can be found at Anandtech for those who are eager to learn more on the details of the circuit.
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