I bet you have seen the NVIDIA Tegra 2 moniker been thrown all over the place these days. CES 2011 is over now and we saw a slew of smartphones, tablets and Whats Not powered by Nvidia latest and greatest mobile platform. So what’s all the fuss about it and how high should you place your expectations for your next dual-core smartphone?
Although it sure looks like a computer CPU, the Tegra 2 chip is more complex than that. It’s packaged the same way, however inside it there is an ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, 1MB worth of shared L2 cache, an ultra-low power GeForce GPU and as many as five other co-processors that help the dual-core big-boy do its job most efficiently.
Unfortunately, the current crop of mobile processors have hit a bump in their development. Pumping the clock rate and cache can only get you so far before any further voltage tweaks start sucking your battery juice in less than a day.
Enter dual-core platforms where multitasking is distributed evenly between the two cores thus allowing more flexibility in multitasking helped by capable dedicated processing hardware for specific tasks such as gaming and HD video playback and recording. Its much the same path desktop CPUs took from single-core to dual-core five years ago.
But how fast is it?
Without getting into the technical side of things any further, here is how fast the Tegra 2 is in a synthetic benchmark against some of the Android competition. According to Nvidia technology White paper, the Tegra 2 has a twice as fast Javascript performance as compared to the Galaxy S, for instance.
The dual-core architecture brings a total of 30% faster page load times as compared to the same configuration but with only one core enabled. That should give you a pretty good idea of the expected comparative performance gain regardless of custom architecture and OS.
