Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang discussed his Tegra processors at the AsiaD conference and noted that the development of mobile smartphone and tablet processors is getting quite expensive.
In Nvidia's case, Tegra raked up a cost of more than $2 billion over the past five years, Huang said.
The cost for developing such a chip is likely to go up over time, Huang said, and is driven by an approach to come up with "something magical" and "unexpected" in every product generation. For example, while Kal-El will be moving to four cores, with one additional supporting core, the cores in the succeeding product generation will offer more performance and there will be a feature that catches Nvidia's rivals "off-guard", the executive said.
He also speculated that, as tablet and smartphone markets expand, they may segment and there may be reasons for companies such as Apple to actually buy third-party processors that accommodate the requirements of those segments.
Everybody doesn't hate Nvidia
Everybody doesn't hate Nvidia
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Multiple cores are not just for multitasking.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/iphone-4s-a5-performance,3051-3.html
... and what is the use of great system specs, when you don't have a lot of software to back it up completely...
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nvidia-android-tegra-honeycomb-huang,news-35606.html
... they need to go hand in hand... hardware and software... maybe the hardware with a bit more power, but for or with the software, that's utilizes it fully...
because they can't afford quality products
I was buying nvidia cards since the company started. They had the better value back when they were competing against voodoo. Had everything from the original tnt, to a 6600. After that however, ati has been offering the best bang for the buck. So my latest cards have all been ati.
ATI has been executing better for the last few generations so they win my $s.
It may very well have cost them $2b in development (under $200m/year) but they've made many hundreds of millions selling the current and previous generations and learned enough to be able to go forward with whats possibly the most powerful mobile chip family for some time.
You gotta spend money to make money.
Many OSes also have implemented special threading techniques like OSX Grand central dispatch that solves much of the threading problem.
Nope. Tegra 3 is just a stopgap. Nvidia will be the only ARM vendor with quod core at 40nm. If Nvidia had delivered the chip on time they would have had a huge lead in performance. Now Nvidia will just have a couple of month lead before quod core 28nm A6 SoCs.
Nvidia have many interesting and unique ARM products in the pipeline. The 64bit Denver ARM. 8 core/16 core ARMs.
Nvidias Tesla/ARM strategy is the only thing that can save the company.
I hope that AMD have an alternate strategy if the X86 market starts to fail. AMDs graphics division may be better then Nvidia, but it does not make money.