Nvidia: Tegra 3+ ''Wayne'' Arrives Later This Year
An improved version of Nvidia's Tegra 3 SoS will be available in 3Q12 and capable of working alongside current LTE modems.
On Thursday Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile business unit, confirmed during HTC's Frequencies conference in Seattle that the company plans to release an upgraded Tegra 3 SoC later this year in 3Q12.
A Tegra roadmap displayed during the conference named the new "Wayne" chip as "T3+" or "Tegra 3+," although that will not be the official title when the chip ships to device manufacturers later this year. Rayfield indicated that the SoC will bring better performance to smartphones and tablets, but it won't feature the integrated LTE modem as reported earlier this year.
"It'll be high performance," Rayfield said. "It's a pretty significant bump."
The specs for "Wayne" include a 28-nm quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore plus an additional low power companion core (4-PLUS-1), clocked at 1.8 GHz for tablets and notebooks. Also thrown into the mix will be 24 GPU cores with support for DirectX 11.x, OpenGL 4.x and PhysX. This chip will work alongside 3rd-party LTE modems (the current Kal-El Tegra 3 can't), maybe even ones provided by SoC competitor Qualcomm if they can stand to be with each other on the same device
"In the third quarter we'll start to see numerous models that are LTE shipped with Tegra 3," Rayfield said.
As for the Tegra/Icera LTE modem combo, that chip will be called "Grey" (Tegra+LTE?) and is expected to launch sometime around 1Q13, maybe sooner. The 28-nm chip will come packed with a quad-core ARM Coretex-A9 and an additional low power companion core. It will also have the Icera LTE100/HSPA42 baseband modem.
A recent spec list leak hints that "Wayne" may be available in three flavors this fall: a 1.8 GHz "flagship" version, a 2.0 GHz "flagship" version, and one clocked between 1.2 and 1.8 GHz for "mainstream" devices. We expect to see a more formal announcement regarding "Wayne" sometime soon, so stay tuned.
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Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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dragonsqrrl "Also thrown into the mix will be 24 GPU cores with support for DirectX 11.x, OpenGL 4.x and PhysX."Reply
Wow, that's pretty big. The GPU in Wayne is supposed to be based on a new architecture. Some have even speculated it's a Kepler derivative. This should bring the GPU performance bump many have been waiting for in Tegra SOC's. -
Parsian frozonicsystem on ship??Reply
I am not kidding you, i did read it as "SoC" and then I read your "system on ship" as "system on chip". Brain's interpolation is bad sometimes :P
In regard to the post, I wish AMD had also entered this arena.
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alfaalex101 Buy the 1.2ghz version - get a custom kernal + rom - OC to 2.0 ghz no problemo. Thou mad?Reply -
gilgamex alfaalex101Buy the 1.2ghz version - get a custom kernal + rom - OC to 2.0 ghz no problemo. Thou mad?Reply
It may be lazer cut to reduce performance, like all your 680 GTX compute dreams. -
joytech22 gilgamexIt may be lazer cut to reduce performance, like all your 680 GTX compute dreams.Reply
My dreams live on.. With my GTX580 ;) -
tipoo The current Tegra 3 has an 8 "core" (if people insist on calling them that) GPU, 24 is a massive step up. They would need enough memory bandwidth to feed it though, the current one is already starved on that single channel controller. But assuming they get memory bandwidth to match core speed, 8 to 24 on an improved architecture would put it well past even the A5X graphics.Reply