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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

That means the simulations we're watching require a full quartet of processing cores on top of the 12-core GPU NVIDIA has in Kal-El. Mind-boggling stuff.

Mind boggling indeed, but totally absent in the text and demo was any mention of power usage. Four cores running at 75% utilization plus 12 GPU cores is going to suck down a tablet battery in a hurry.

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Not (much) more than a Tegra 2 running at 75% utilization. Each Tegra 3 core should run at 50-60% power consumption of each Tegra 2 core, if history is any guide. When every chip maker works on a new ARM chip generation, they try to increase performance while maintaining the same overall power consumption of the whole chip. You won't see an ARM chip with 1W TDP in one year, and 1.5-2W the next year, when the new generation arrives. That's why we see dual core phones now with the same, or even bigger battery life than previous single core phones.

Even so, they manage to improve the performance about 2.5x every 12 months, and about 4x every 18 months. That's twice as fast as Moore's Law for x86 chips. That's why the ARM chips keep impressing every year on how fast they progress.

History is partly based on moving to moving to new process nodes to allow you to do more stuff with less power. Unfortunately Kal-El will be running on the same 40nm process that current Tegra processors are running on. To the extent that the device can quickly wake up, get stuff done more quickly than a Tegra 2, then go back to sleep it might be more power efficient than last generation, but not with something like this demo.

EDIT: Remember, the previous generation had two A9 cores, and this one has four A9 cores. My vague impression is that the A9s in Tegra 2 really are more power efficient than the A8s in the original Tegra, but we won't see a transition like that in this generation.

Even worse for Tegra 3, it looks like it's going to start shipping around the same time as Qualcomm's Krait which is 28 nm process. Nvidia needs to ride herd on their supply chain, they keep missing their ideal launch window by a few months.

Qualcomm won't have quad core Krait chips until a year later (mid 2012), so it won't compete with Tegra 3 in performance by far. By mid 2012, Tegra 4 will come out at 28nm as well.

But yes, I agree it would've been nice if they could've moved to 28 nm now, too. But I think Qualcomm will really remain behind performance in the next few years. Their custom Scorpion cores are weaker than Cortex A9 now, and I assume Krait will also be weaker than Cortex A15 which Nvidia, Apple and others will use. It's probably the reason why they could go to 28nm so fast, too.

Qualcomm has been right in the thick of it over the past 18 months. They're leapfrogged atm but they also just bumped their GPU and are about to start shipping 1.5 Ghz chips that appear more then competitive:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4243/dual-core-snapdragon-gpu-...

Yes that's a higher clock speed then the competition but they've also announced higher clock speeds for their quad cores next year.

Sorry... must... resist... can't!

Moore's law has nothing to do with speed, only transistor count in the same space. While the speed increases are impressive, they're still picking off the low hanging fruit, as people haven't fully figured out how to optimize for the space yet. Kal-El will reportedly be using 40nm transistors, compared to the 22nm process Intel is able to do.

Which means there's more room for the amazing in the arena. :)

Intel is still in the mobile game? Sorry this is kind of news to me, I haven't been keeping up.

I wonder if they would use Android or MeeGo...

Meego was originally a joint effort between Intel and Nokia.

And since Nokia's bailed it wouldn't really shock the world if Intel eventually gave up on Meego too.

There was a fair amount of community involvement and some other companies. Intel and Nokia were the major players here. Also Nokia is supposed to release a Meego phone; they said that they will be using Windows mobile to replace Symbian in low and middle tier devices, and they haven't really commented on upper tier. To be honest, I probably won't be buying a Meego phone from Nokia if they ship one. My N900 is fun, but I feel it doesn't get enough attention from them.

Obviously, the biggest factor for Meego's success is if it can get any real attention from the media and consumers.

Intel won't have an Atom at 22nm until late 2013. By then Tegra 5 should be out, which who knows with how many Cortex A15 cores, at 28 nm. In 2014, ARM chip makers will move to 20 nm.

Intel's advantage is only of about 1 processing node generation, but that's not even for Atom right now. It's only for their highest end chips. Current Atom is at 45 nm, and it will move to 32nm next year, when ARM chips will be at 28nm. But this doesn't even matter anyway. Even if Intel was 2 processing nodes ahead, ARM would still be more efficient.

Intel will stop making bricks (metaphor) and skip 28nm and go directly to 20nm for Atom. It is their only hope to get into mobile, even then it will be a weak value prop as the entire mobile market will be on an ARM ISA.

Even though the whole dev chain is slightly more flexible to an ISA change, Intel will still be slighty x86ed out of the market only they will be on the other side of the fence this time.

Intel won't run on the phones, but they might, if they play their cards right run on tablets and netbooks.

It really does suck to be the 900 Lb gorilla.

Actually, Intel is moving Atom to 14nm (!) in 2014: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-14nm-atom-chip-in-2...

ARM chips are only (notably) more efficient when they slower. If you compare like vs like it's not as simple. Eg, 2 GHz ARM A9's are roughly more as powerful as a 1.8 GHz Atom, and have similar power budgets (leaving aside Intel's pathetic chipset & graphics support for now)

According to a salesmen at a Nokia booth after being asked the question: How about battery life?

Battery life should increase. Because we have 4 cores, we can run them on lower voltages. So overall, our plans are, and we expect to have better battery life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhDmQCOyXrU

The power consumption and battery life should be akin to the Tegra 2.

If you're doing one core worth of work on four cores and it's well-parallelized then you can run the cores slower. But in this demo they're running all the cores pretty busy, which will use more power.

"Mind boggling indeed, but totally absent in the text and demo was any mention of power usage."

That is because NVIDIA is really bad with power usage. Like Intel, they are optimized(the graphic chips) for being faster and faster, not taking less power.

It is not so easy for them to change that. The same way ARM was created from scratch for mobile devices so was OpenVR (the graphic accelerator behind iPad and iPhone).

OpenVR started in the desktop developing low power graphic cards, I used one of them but NOBODY CARED back on the day. People do not care at all about the Nvidia card consuming 200Watts because power on the grid is cheap.

I guess they will make mobile devices for gaming with huge batteries and people that want high quality games will buy them.

I think you mean PowerVR

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