These two SoC-making giants have revealed their development roadmap for quite some time now, let's take a look at how these two companies have their future prep-ed up their sleeves.
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Jump right into the action after the break!
1. nVidia Tegra SeriesTegra 2 is the current most-used SoC in dual-core smartphones and tablets. The older generation Tegra 2, named Tegra 250 AP20H, is built on 40nm architecture and runs the ARMv7 instruction set. It's a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU coupled with ULP GeForce 300Mhz - comprising 4 pixel shaders and 4 vertex shaders. It lacks ARMs advanced SIMB extension, and is known to have problems decoding high profile 1080p videos. The old chip is used notably in LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Atrix 4G, Droid X2, Photon and Samsung Galaxy Z.
The newer chip, named Tegra 250 T20 has exactly the same specifications, except it has a GPU clocked at a higher 333Mhz. Up to this point, there has not been much improvements over the H.264 high profile decoding, as many have complained. It is expected to see much better improvements in Tegra 3 as it promises 1080p H.264 high profile video decoding. On the other hand, the Tegra series have reported extremely decent performance in terms of hardware accelerated flash rendering, for more information visit
here.
Tegra 3 (codenamed Kal-El) is the hottest upcoming SoC for tablets and smartphones. Previews of its performance are jaw-dropping as it boosts a huge 5x performance in both CPU and GPU over its predecessor. It is now built as a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore clocked at 1.5Ghz with 12-core nVidia GPU bringing full support for 3D stereo. It continues to run on ULP GPU mode but now enhanced with advanced SIMB extension, known as NEON instruction. The build architecture is the same at 40nm. There had been some videos of of a Tegra 3 powered tablet displaying 1440p video output at 60fps to a LCD TV, and the maximum resolution goes up to 2560x1600 - much like GeForce standard GPUs. Tegra 3 supported smartphones are expected early 2012 while tablets as soon as October.
Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) is yet another 40nm but now boosting a quad/octa-core ARM Cortex A15 MPCore capable of performing up to 2.5Ghz. In fact, ARM has confirmed that the Cortex A15 is 40% faster than the A9 in terms of CPU. However according to ARM (again), A15 cores were meant to be built on 32nm or 28nm process and even down to 20nm. I have currently no information as to why nVidia is building Tegra 4 chips on 40nm but it comes with true GeForce GPU support for DirectX 11+, OpenGL 4.X, OpenCL 1.X and PhysX engine on a astonishingly improved 24 (quad) and 32 to 64 (octa) GPU cores. It's claimed to perform 10 times faster than Tegra 2 and scheduled for release late 2012.
Tegra 5 (codenamed Logan) is the next generation SoC by nVidia finally going down to 28nm process and promises huge GPU improvements. There has been further information except its scheduled reveal in 2013 and is said to be 50 times faster than Tegra 2.
Tegra 6 (codenamed Stark) has even less revealed information, scheduled to be in 2014 and claims 75 times higher performance than Tegra 2.
Tegra Grey series is a specially built SoC with integrated 3G/4G baseband scheduled for release in 2012. This has some similarities with Qualcomm's S4 class SoC.
2. Qualcomm Snapdragon Series
Snapdragon S1 has been the first commercially most-used single-core processor to date, ranging from the oldest QSD8250 bundled Adreno 200. Examples of such utilization were mostly first generation Android phones, such as the Xperia X10 and HTC Desire. The Adreno 200 does not support hardware accelerated Flash. It only has very limited compatibility and API support. Chips of this generation have low tolerances and should not exceed 1.3Ghz with base of 1.0Ghz.
Snapdragon S2 is basically what powers almost all our single-core smartphones out there. It comes bundled with its mate Adreno 205 - now enhanced with hardware accelerated flash for better browsing experience. As compared to Adreno 200, it has programmable function pipeline and streaming textures with API support for OpenGL ES 2.0, 1.1, Open VG 1.1, EGL 1.3, Direct 3D mobile, SVGT 1.2 and DirectDraw. The early generation in S2 is known as the MSM8255 45nm chipset, while later on it offers MSM8255T for devices like the Xperia Arc S and Samsung Galaxy S Plus. Now the interesting thing behind Snapdragon processors is that even with sub-par benchmark results, the Snapdragon performs outstandingly well on behalf of its underlooked specs. It provides a wide chip tolerance and capable of running up to 1.8 - 1.9Ghz overclocked.
Snapdragon S3 is Qualcomm's answer to dual-core processor for Android devices, notably the HTC Sensation and the upcoming Sensation XE, HTC EVO 3D, Puccini as well as the HP TouchPad. Now according to Qualcomm, Adreno 220 which comes bundled with Snapdragon S3 chipsets provide 5 times or more the graphic performance of Adreno 200. It comes with upgraded API support and higher max clock speed.
Snapdragon S4 is the newly announced next generation SoC by Qualcomm up to 2.5Ghz quad-core while offering dual-cores of up to 1.2Ghz. All of these new generation chips are build on 28nm. The Adreno 305 is packaged with the dual-core line-up, however quad-core will be mating with Adreno 320. Qualcomm also claimed 3G/4G integrated support, similar to the Tegra Grey series. So far there has been not much information revealed regarding Adreno 320, but hopefully it poses a challenge with nVidia's Tegra.
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All in all, these are very promising developments in ARM development. However current blunders are that even dual-cores have not been fully utilized and the processing power is rather laid to a waste with current software handling. So hopefully in the near future operating systems like the upcoming Windows 8 and Ice Cream Sandwich would put these powerful beasts to good use.
Let me know what you guys think.
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