Nvidia officially unveils next-generation Tegra 4 SoC
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
All that said, their Shield handheld console looks pretty spectacular, if vaporous.
5" ~retinesque~ touchscreen clamshelled onto a full-size game controller with all the bells and whistles. Outrageously powerful, has HDMI, USB, headphones, and holds a 5-10 hour charge. Runs pure Android with full Google Play access and a specially curated library built for the console itself. Can also wirelessly stream games off of a PC, including from Steam Big Picture. Cloud storage of game state comes free.
Not announced: price, storage, availability, who's making it, sales channels, or anything. So whatever. But this -is- the Sony PSP slayer, and it is another sign that all roads lead to Android+OpenGL ES on ARM as the future default game platform.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6550/more-details-on-nvidias-t...
Demo example: "Here are the guys who made the game Hawken." Who? What company? What is Hawken? What does this game mean for the industry? How is it showing off your product in the best light? What does this mean for developers?
No, none of that gets answered. Two cameras drill in through shitty sightlines at three anonymous men playing a game in silence while Jen-Hsun Huang asks things like "where are you guys at right now?" and "so what are you doing?"
There's a reason why the main gaming console manufacturers also have large development studios as well. Every new gaming device needs a killer app to launch it past the critical mass where it becomes economically beneficial for outside developers (3rd parties) to also release software for said platform.
nVidia doesn't have game studios (that they've announced anyway) so they're going to be relying on the broader Android gaming developers. However, Android developers are going to be targeting the hundreds of millions of phone/tablet Android devices and not unknown number of Shield owners.
So if very few developers are going to take the development resources to make games that take advantage of the Shield then how many gamers are going to want to spend the kind of money this will cost, when there are MANY other great alternatives (E3 this year will see the announcement of PS4 and the next Xbox).
If the hardcore gamers aren't going to be purchasing this system, then that leaves the so-called casual gamers. However, by definition this thing is targeting hardcore gamers so it doesn't have much appeal to casual gamers at all. Which means there's a very narrow market segment that is seriously interested in this.
Anyway, it sounds like NVidia is putting out a device to show people what the Tegra 4 can do. They have to build prototype devices anyway; they might as well sell a few of them while they're at it. They're not expecting to create their own platform: the Shield is just useful for basically acting as a controller for your PC or as a box for playing Android games.
There's more to the market than "hardcore gamers" (how hardcore can you be using a portable device anyway?) There's the Windows 8 tablet and Android tablet markets, which NVidia would very much like to win. I also would not be greatly surprised to see an SoC like this in Steam's new box, either.
The Tegra4 does indeed look quite stellar!
And this is the Android gaming device. A controller that doesn't require a usb port or finnicky wifi / bluetooth. So that is its killer feature.
At some point HDR processing should become part of the hardware pipeline in every sensor, and we'll simply have a selectable dynamic range.
I have noticed more and more cameras implementing automatic color correction resulting in orange people and color changes while filming the same scene. I think HDR looks unnatural.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yury-prokopenko/3561920871/ligh...
Or this (beyond terrible):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nik-on/4624961812/
But that's the photographer's fault. HDR is just a way of compensating for lack of dynamic range in a sensor. Used correctly it should make the image more real, not less, by bringing it closer to the human eye's full dynamic range. Examples:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/margall69/7496881548/lightbox/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankspecht/4954970921/lightbox... (snow and sky would be completely blown out without HDR)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelgcumming/4525129653/ligh...
(Disclaimer: I'm not a photographer, and the only thing I know about photography is what I learned in college computer vision courses and overheard from friends.)
A lot of people dismiss them because they're "unrealistic" (which they obviously are) but I ask you is an oil painting unrealistic? For example this:
http://snapzlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Oil-Painting...
Clearly that is a painting, but if exactly the same picture was acquired using HDR everyone would dismiss it as being terrible?
My point is that you can use HDR to get realistic looking pictures, but you can also use HDR for "artistic" reasons, like painting using your camera. A lot of photographers are dismissive of the latter because they want to pretend photography is a practical rather than artistic endeavour.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/20/Sony-Stacked-CMOS-se...
Scumbag Nvidia? I would doubt that either browser makes significant use of >2 threads, leaving most of the performance difference that was not due to the 200mhz clock increase explained by the different browser.
So basically Tegra 4 shouldn't be "2x faster" than Nexus 10, but probably more like 1.5x-1.8x faster, depending on how much more they optimized the stock browser over Chrome.
I wonder if this Tegra 4 chip will have enough horsepower encode the extended dynamic range of the HDR video into a usable 16bit/32bit video format, at good quality bitrates. What codec would it use? h.265?
Sony has the best dynamic range in consumer sensors, hope there will be some products combining this into a truly usable and user configurable product - either in a phone or a consumer camera.
Doesn't mean there shouldn't be some helpers in the SDK in the likes of "if NEON is supported execute <optimized code path/ARM assembly>, else <slow stuff>".
I mean the same statement can be made for Android and Widget Apps, Homescreen Apps and whatever else is not possible on iOS. I doubt the amount of your niche apps is more then a fraction of those :P
P.S.: My point is, that there will always be differences in the available apps plainly because the API is not the same. I am wondering though, what apps can be done on iOS that can't be done on Android.
To some extent this also impacts all games, since high-latency playback hurts the experience.
See: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/jelly-bean.html (Section is called Low-latency Audio).
edit: So, even when said apps were not possible in the past, now would be a very good time to port your app (or those apps in general), because then this is a niche which is not yet filled and there is some money to be made by being #1 in that niche :)
There's some hope for 4.2 but needless to say there's no point targeting that market yet. None of the devices currently on the market have acceptable audio latency. And Android still has no MIDI support.
Android has its strengths but it can't hold a candle to iOS for these kinds of applications.
As mentioned on here and elsewhere, maybe development will cater to the lowest-common-denominator as far as SoCs go and the OUYA will be OK, but I feel like the audience for the OUYA won't particularly like being on a last-gen mobile SoC.
I don't have any experience developing for Android, but I can imagine developing for Android phone handhelds is hard enough already.
I'm really hoping once this thing gets benchmarked that Nvidia finally hits it out of the park on the graphics side, for being the foremost GPU company of the last decade they sure screwed up ULP Geforce with 7000 series gpus from a decade ago. I think these are Kepler cores, and they have proven themselves fantastic on the desktop.
Would you like to qualify that statement?
The really smart bit here though is the LTE capability. If nVidia goes 'all in' on building integrated CPU/GPU/Wireless cores then that puts even more pressure on Intel to integrate or leave the market. Intel has not had a stellar track record with regard to wireless unfortunately.
It is certainly going to be an interesting decade.
If US carriers insist on locking down 4G LTE onto expensive multi-year contract subsidized devces, Intel may not have to worry for another generation. So the real wildcard here is, I think, T-Mobile.
If Intel doesn't get multi-core I wonder how well a design firm that makes chips designed for the rendering pipline fair? What kind of load balancing does CUDA offer? Didn't they implement recursion a few weeks back? Scalar stream processor smacks of the Cray 1.
Intel's lack of understanding has enabled it to catch 75% of market share. 2 years ago Intel demonstrated their understanding by increasing clock-speed when AMD dumped more cores onto their CPUs creating the underwhelming Interlagos.
There are some (specialized) types of computation for which parts made by AMD/ATI and Nvidia are greatly superior. That Nvidia and other ARM licensees have completely taken over the fast growing mobile device market with efficient multicore CPUs with integrated GPUs is really significant to Intel.
This number of cores remarks started to remind me of the gigahertz race between Intel, Amd and Cyrix back in the days.
I never saw them mixing up the GPU and CPU cores. They have 4 CPU cores and they kept on saying it.
See for instance the (huge) tables at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_p..., under the "Config core" column you can see each model's configuration of cores.
You can see that the idea that a GPU has several types of core, and various amount of each, goes back 5+ years.