Nvidia Brings Kepler to Mobile Devices

This time they're completely changing the architecture, though, but Nvidia is also known for huge delays, so not sure how that will work out for them. I think Kepler was already supposed to be in Tegra 4. And now they only get one extra year to port Maxwell to Tegra 6, after they put Kepler in Tegra 5.

So I'm a little skeptical, too - but maybe not so much on the performance side (as they say, it's hugely scalable, and has OpenGL API support that is simply unmatchable by the competition over the next few years), but about power consumption.

They say it's very efficient and uses very little power, but lately Nvidia's focus has been too much on performance, and too little on power consumption. Here's a tip for you Nvidia: If your chip can't be put in a phone, don't call it a "mobile" chip.

I think that's how all mobile chip makers should think. Because at least then, they can make a very efficient chip that helps a phone last for 2 days, and for tablets they just scale up from that and overclock it or add more cores. But if they do it the other way around, they'll get greedy and want to put too much performance in it, and force OEM's to use bigger and bigger batteries (which adds to the cost, and so on). Or it forces the chip makers to fork the chip line, into a lower-end more efficient one, and a higher-end more performance oriented one, like it happened to both Nvidia and ARM.

Another tip for Nvidia: When in doubt, use the smaller process node. They failed to do that with Tegra 3, when everyone else moved early to 28/32nm, and they paid a huge price for it in the market, in both lost branding and lost customers. So next time, choose the smaller process node, even if it's more expensive. It will be worth it, because both OEM's and customers will be asking for it. So what I'm saying is Tegra 5 needs to be 20nm next year, not 28nm.

Absolutely. I think a lot of what we're seeing here is largely the result of process reduction. That's not to say that improved design isn't at play as well, but the sub-30nm processes seem to have been a threshold for "desktop-performance" processing at size and power levels which can be truly mobile. Further, graphics processors always benefit tremendously from process reduction because they're essentially just very large arrays of very simple processors.

On the power front, smaller process means less energy needed to switch transistors. To illustrate the point, I was working with some 22nm NAND flash at my last job. In order to better understand the the characteristics of the chip's raw bit errors (errors before error correction is applied) we had a lengthy conversation with one of Micron's engineers. It turns out that in a 22nm NAND chip, the difference between a set and an unset bit is approximately the charge equivalent of 8 electrons.

I wonder how you would deal with the extra heat output in a desktop state.

I'd rather have an updated version of the MintBox. Imagine having a decent portable, powerful enough Linux workstation/router that can be deployed anywhere, home, office or in the field.