Hasta La Gadget!

NVIDIA’s historically outspoken CEO, Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang, just took the stage here at AsiaD, and among other things, he confirmed to Walt that the Tegra roadmap is well established, and in fact, the entire next-gen range is being produced (internally, of course) right now. That’s Kal-El, Wayne, Logan and Stark, all codenamed after superheroes — Superman, Batman, Wolverine and Ironman, in order of mention. In response to a question of if ASUS’ Transformer Prime would be “the first Tegra 3-based product,” Huang simply answered “probably.”

He continued by explaining that it generally takes around three years to build a new generation of Tegra: “We’d like to have a processor every year, and so we’re building three in a row.” Tegra 3 will end up being the world’s first quad-core ARM processor (much like the Tegra 2 was the first dual-core), and he confirmed that NVIDIA has invested some $2 billion in Tegra alone. Finally, he confirmed that the inner workings we’ve heard about in Project Denver will first be present in the Tegra line with the introduction of Stark — a long ways out, but at least you’ve got something (else) to look forward to.

NVIDIA CEO confirms Tegra roadmap, building all now: Kal-El, Wayne, Logan, Stark originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve known about Kal-El — the quad-core mobile processor from NVIDIA — for a fair amount of time, but a lot of the finer details have remained a secret as we’ve anxiously awaited its debut in tablets and smartphones. Fortunately, we have some reading material to bide our time as the company published white papers discussing benefits of the new CPU, and for the most part it’s what you’d expect: NVIDIA touts higher performance, better battery life and improved physics-based gaming when more cores are involved and working together.

What came as a surprise to us was the fact that this quad-core CPU actually utilizes five cores: in addition to the standard four main Cortex A9 high-performance cores, Kal-El throws in a fifth Cortex A9 “companion” core specifically designed to handle less demanding tasks in effort to minimize power consumption caused by active standby processes. How is it done? The Companion core’s max operating frequency gets capped at 500MHz, offering higher performance and greater efficiency per watt when running menial tasks such as push email, Twitter / Facebook sync, widgets, background apps and live wallpapers. This leaves the four main cores free to take care of the stuff it does best — games, web browsing, transcoding / editing audio and video, 3D, physics simulations and image processing, to name a few — allowing performance bumps of up to 50 percent when compared to Tegra 2. We can tell that quad-core devices are going to make us very, very happy. If charts and geeky stats brighten up your day like it does ours, head to the source to read the papers in their entirety.

NVIDIA releases Kal-El white papers, announces a fifth ‘Companion’ core for less demanding tasks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The IdeaPad K1 is really living up to its name these days, existing merely as an idea and a visualized concept, but not a real deal purchasable commodity. That’s changing ever so slowly, however, with an appearance among Amazon’s pre-order inventory, where the Tegra 2 Android slate is accompanied by the $499.99 price tag we saw just over a week ago. The major specs are as we’ve heard them before: a 10.1-inch screen with 1280 x 800 resolution and 300 nits of brightness, a microSD card reader, micro-HDMI out, and, interestingly, a SIM card slot. The latter doesn’t quite confirm that we’re looking at a 3G tablet, but comes close to it. Also close should be the K1’s release date, which isn’t spelled out by Amazon, but is expected to arrive any time now.

Lenovo IdeaPad K1 up for Amazon pre-order, still toting $500 price tag originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Droid 3 is upon us! Well, it is if you live in China and don’t mind calling it the Milestone 3. A new XT883 model has just been made official by Motorola during China Telecom’s CDMA Summit, touting the tagline “the third Milestone” and a new five-row slideout QWERTY keyboard. The salient specs include a 4-inch touchscreen with qHD (540 x 960) resolution, a dual-core Tegra 2 processor capable of driving 1080p video recording, an 8 megapixel rear camera with LED flash, up to 32GB of built-in storage, and of course, Android 2.3 as the shipping OS. A pretty compelling package, we think you’ll agree. It’s coming to China this summer, though Moto could still be crafty enough to squeeze the US launch in before actual units start shipping to Yao Ming’s homeland. Because, well, who’s ever heard of a Milestone coming before a Droid?

Continue reading Motorola Droid 3 official in China under Milestone 3 moniker, packs 4-inch qHD display

Motorola Droid 3 official in China under Milestone 3 moniker, packs 4-inch qHD display originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 03:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just when we thought the Motorola Xoom had hit its stride at a blazing 1.504 billion operations cycles per second, the trusty Tiamat kernel has strapped on an veritable afterburner capable of 1.7GHz. What happens when your shaking hands flip that switch and give that Tegra 2 all the jet fuel it can take? Well, anecdotal cases from the XDA-developers forums suggest it’ll probably just reboot anticlimactically. If you’re lucky enough to have the magic silicon, however, you’ll be treated to a benchmark-blitzing rig, reportedly capable of 70 MFLOPS in Linpack, 1480ms runs in SunSpider, and Quadrant scores approaching a smooth 5,000. See just how far that rainbow benchmark bar can stretch in a screencap after the break.

Update: There’s a jolly discussion in comments about whether gigahertz can be directly translated to operations per second in the case of the Tegra 2 — we’ll err on the side of caution and say cycles per second instead.

Continue reading Motorola Xoom hits 1.7GHz, teeters on the edge of oblivion

Motorola Xoom hits 1.7GHz, teeters on the edge of oblivion originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Jun 2011 08:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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