Nvidia unveiled the Tegra 3 platform last year at Mobile World Congress. Since then the chip has lived its short life mostly misunderstood. You see, it’s a quad-core chip with another 500MHz companion core that handles low-power background tasks — an architecture Nvidia previously called variable symmetric multiprocessing. But that’s a mouthful and likely a bit hard to properly market to consumers.
From here on out Nvidia wants the Tegra 3 to be called a 4-Plus-1 chip, m’kay? Nvidia even went as far as trademarking the new name. → Read More
Sometimes it’s easy to forget companies that aren’t Apple and Samsung and Sony. But chipmakers deserve your love too, which is why you should sit back and relax while you check out this webcast of Nvidia’s live press conference at the CES 2012 International show in Las Vegas.
We have no idea what we’ll see here but chances are it’ll make a big difference in the way we use our gadgetry over the next year. I’ve got my fingers crossed for more efficient processing (read: longer battery life), since we’ve already seen Nvidia’s quad-core chip, the Tegra 3.
→ Read More
Forget that specs do not matter for a minute. The first bit of competitive benchmarks of the Nvidia Tegra 3 are just now hitting thanks to the Asus Transformer Prime. Nvidia’s quad-core mobile platform will likely be the de facto chipset to power Ice Cream Sandwich tablets; it will be everywhere next year. Nvidia has long touted the Tegra 3′s processing power, stating that the platform will absolutely trounce all competitors including the aging dual-core Apple A5. That doesn’t seem to be the case though. Early benchmarks are stating the A5 keeps up just fine. → Read More
We are entering into a new era, ladies and gentlemen. Well, “era” may not be the right word considering how quickly things change in these here mobile parts, but the fact remains the same: Quad-core mobile processors are here. And the ones that aren’t quite here yet are coming.
While many of our brilliantly geeky readers need no tutorial on the advantages of four processing cores, some of you may be thinking “Uh… OK, why do I care?” So I took it upon myself to place a few calls and get some of the big guns — Qualcomm, Nvidia, and TI — to explain why exactly you should care (or shouldn’t), and what kind of differences technology like this can make in the average user’s daily phone usage. → Read More
There has been a lot of whispering about Nvidia’s next-generation Tegra chip, code-named Kal-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name, for the uninitiated), since it was first detailed on a roadmap back in Februrary. But it hasn’t shown up quite yet in any actual handsets or tablets, though we’re told it has been adopted by the majors and will have its debut soon.
Nvidia today released some new information about the SoC that confirms Tegra’s status as the brand to beat in the mobile computing world. Turns out it’s not quad-core, it’s penta-core. And the “companion core” is designed to take over while all the others go to sleep. → Read More
If the meek capitulation in the headline sounds uncharacteristic of Nvidia’s infamously outspoken CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, it’s probably because he’s bitter. Though the GPU-focused company announced way back in 2008 that it was going to “open a can of whoop-ass” on Intel, very little has happened, at least on the consumer side. Intel and Nvidia have had some major differences, and remain fierce competitors, but it’s been made clear that Intel won’t tolerate anyone making a grab at its x86 treasure hoard.
But Nvidia isn’t going quietly. Or rather, they’re going quietly just so they can sneak around the back. While Intel is cracking its whip at anyone who wants a piece of x86, Nvidia and ARM, among others, are performing a flanking maneuver in the mobile sector. → Read More
If you have a 3D gaming rig, the biggest problem you have is showing it off. You can either run the game wear the glasses and then say “I swear, it’s 3D!” or you give your friend the glasses and show him or her what to do and then you can’t share in the joy. This either ends in violence or sobbing. Your choice. Now, however, your friend can wear these super cheap $99 glasses with a USB cable. All you have to do is plug them in and you can both watch things in 3D at the same time. Bang. No sobbing. You do still require a full 3D Vision set-up including IR dongle. The glasses are available in June. Product Page → Read More
Coming soon to an Nvidia-powered computer near you: 3D Web video! Cheers all around, half-slices for everyone. Nvidia made the announcement at NAB 2011, the same place where Apple announced Final Cut Pro X. The 3D video will be delivered via a plugin for the Microsoft Media Platform, aka Silverlight. → Read More
Digital Storm has bumped up its top-of-the-line gaming desktop PC to include the just-released Nvidia GTX 590. The absolute top-of-the-line PC is hilariously overpowered, with two GTX 590s in SLI that effectively deliver the power of four GPUs in one PC. Madness! → Read More
The latest bit of gossip puts the Nvidia GTX 590 release date at March 22. Does that date sound familiar? It should, because that’s when Crysis 2 will be released → Read More
Kal-El, the quad-core megachip that Nvidia plans to come after Tegra 2, is exciting enough news, but what about the rest of the roadmap? Usually these charts reflect some internal logic and naming system, but stuff like Nehalem, Bulldozer, and Skulltrail are hard for the average geek to really relate to. Nvidia’s putting an end to that, in style. → Read More
The cheeky head of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang, frequently trashes other companies and makes announcements like how he’s going to open a can of whoop-ass on Intel. This week, he’s ragging on tablets. The iPad is spared his ire, because, let’s face it, it’s a successful and useful device. But the Galaxy Tab? “A tablet is not a large phone.”
Harsh. I wonder if this guy reads my articles? → Read More
A mainframe in China running a number of NVIDIA GPUs in parallel just hit 2.5 petaflops, a number that places it in the number one slot in the list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers. The Chinese machine, called Tianhe-1A, looks like it will be the fastest supercomputer for at least six months and experts are suggesting that we could see the waning of the great American supercomputing empire. → Read More
Although everybody seems to recognize the Tegra brand, there are precious few products actually using it, though it is suited to tablets and the next year may bring surprises. Certainly today brought a surprise in the form of NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang casually noting that Tegra 3 is nearly done and work beginning on Tegra 4. → Read More
ATI, we hardly knew ye. Word on the street is that AMD, which bought ATI for a cool $5.4 billion some four years ago, will phase out the ATI name later this year. Apparently AMD’s research indicates that people prefer the AMD name to the ATI name, but that, above that, the name that really sells is Radeon. Goodbye ATI Radeon Pro, hello AMD Radeon Pro. → Read More
How long did Blizzard spend developing StarCraft II? Since 2003, give or take some time here and there when the company needed all hands on deck for World of Warcraft. So you’d think that would be enough time to figure out how to implement anti-aliasing into the graphics engine, right? You see where I’m going with this. → Read More
We don’t cover driver updates a lot here at CrunchGear because the changelog is usually pretty trivial — small performance gain here, bug fix there. But the latest update to the NVIDIA Optimus drivers (the ones governing hybrid graphics on notebooks) has some features I wish I’d had years ago. The ability to see when your GPU is in use, the load, and what’s causing it are great tools for power users. Visibility of the GPU’s role in the system is important, since power draw and GPU needs are increasing all the time, yet batteries aren’t getting much bigger. [via PC Perspsective] → Read More
This is the world’s first Nvidia-certified full tower chassis. It’s the Thermaltake Element V, and it’s been specially certified to accommodate Nvidia’s two newest GPUs, the GTX 480 and the GTX 470. As you might imagine, a key feature of the chassis is thermal management. That’s to be expected given how hot those Fermi cards run. → Read More
This is pretty funny. You’ve probably seen some of the propaganda over the last year or so about how GPUs are orders of magnitude faster than CPUs at certain tasks, due to their parallel processing engine. Intel got tired of hearing about it, I guess, and decided to debunk the myth. They set out to disprove the notion that a GPU can be 100 times faster than a CPU. They kind of did it, but I think this is what is termed a Pyrrhic victory. → Read More
Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on Windows, hope you’ve got an nVidia GPU… → Read More
San Francisco, CA
