
NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor details leaked - mtgx
http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/18/nvidia-tegra-4-processor-leak-4-plus-1-quad-core-28nm/
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p4bl0
I don't really understand why we are putting this kind of computational power
in mobile phones. I mean, for the daily usage of almost everyone, I don't even
see the difference between a Samsung Galaxy S3 (or an iPhone 5) and my phone
which is a Wiko Cink Slim. Yes the phone I'm using is only dual-core at 1 GHz
and not a 1.5 GHz quad-core, yes it "only" has 512 Mo of RAM instead of 1 or 2
Go, yes its screen pixel density is less impressive (but still more than two
times better than what we have on laptop screens). But I actually can't see a
difference when I'm using it: it is as fluid and as responsive. The main
difference I see is that I paid my phone less than 150€ while the Galaxy S3 or
the iPhone 5 are four times more expensive than that.

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zyb09
Because 64 KB of RAM should be enough for everybody, right? Common, just
because phones seem fast enough for everything right now, there's always the
next killer app lurking around the corner waiting for a little increase in
performance to happen. What about really good AR? You think that's gonna be
cheap on the hardware? Or driving external monitors, using as phone as laptop
replacement, with a full blown OS? HN of all places should understand this!

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Raphael
"Come on" or "C'mon" or , not "Common".

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jug6ernaut
My question is if this amounts to 1/6 the battery life.

I personally don't care for gfx intensive mobile games, i would rather OEM's
focus on efficiency rather then raw power. But thats just my 2 cents.

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mseebach
More interesting to me in this regard are the "4+1" cores. The +1 is a low-
powered standby core. I don't know if it's new, but if not, it could change
the battery life profile quite a bit.

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dmbass
The Tegra 3 had this feature and appears to work relatively well according to
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/5779/htc-one-x-for-att-
review/...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5779/htc-one-x-for-att-review/3)

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fredliu
If i'm not mistaken, that review is for One X for att, which doesn't have
Tegra 3 in it. It does have data for Tegra 3 (One X international version),
but it doesn't seem to support the claim that Tegra 3 is more power efficient
because of the +1 core.

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mtgx
Maybe not more efficient than everything else out there, but more efficient
than if it used 4 cores only - especially at that 40 nm process. I think
Samsung's Exynos processor was a bit more efficient, even though it didn't
have the 5th core, but it was made at 32nm.

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wmf
6x seems like a big difference; it makes me wish Ouya had waited a few months.

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a3_nm
> 6x seems like a big difference

From the user's point of view, maybe not. If you do not do anything which
requires much CPU power, then the difference may be between waiting 6
milliseconds and waiting 1 millisecond. I believe the parent's question was to
know which kind of task requires the CPU power.

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polshaw
Parent is talking about the GPU performance; there are six times more graphics
cores. The use case for OUYA, a games console, requiring more graphics power
is surely obvious.

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protomyth
I really wish someone with the skill and the money would build a C64/Atari
800/Acorn-style computer with one of these. I bet sub-$100 would be a
possibility.

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Raphael
Do you mean a device where the expectation is that the user will do his own
programming? I don't see the need for special hardware. Just make apps that
make programming more accessible. Or even just emulate the old hardware.

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protomyth
I think programming will be more accessible if there is sub $100 hardware that
allows a person to program it out of the box. Apps that make programming more
accessible need to run on something and the entry price to programming is not
as cheap as it was.

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palebluedot
The Tegra 4 is based on the Cortex A15, and the A15 makes things very
interesting for high-power ARM mobile computing. The A15 supports hardware
virtualization, and already has preliminary support in QEMU/KVM. A tablet with
hardware virtualization support would be very interesting (well, at least to
me :))

