NVidia Tegra4i chip upgraded before it's released

NVidia has upgraded it's all-in-one system-on-chip the Tegra4i to support Category 4 LTE before it's even been commercialised.

Category 4 LTE supports 150Mb/s download speeds and is already being implemented by other vendors.

This should give NVidia a better chance against its main competitors (in the Smartphone markets) Qualcomm, Broadcom and LTE-only specialist Altair.

NVidia gained LTE experience by acquiring UK company Icera which uses a software defined architecture and though this technology has been used alongside Tegra4 CPU devices as a separate package, the Tegra4i integrates the technology on to the system as the Tegra4. As Icera's technology is software defined, no actual hardware modifications were required to implement the enhancements.

Currently no mobile networks actually support Category-4 LTE (or LTE Advanced), though Japan's NTT Docomo has said they'll be announcing services by the end of the year.

NVidia delays Tegra4 and revenues will be "flat"

NVidia the chipmaker famed for its high performance graphics cards and now low power Tegra smartphone chips has delayed the introduction of the Tegra4 for about 3 months so it can ensure the integrated LTE is fully ready (in the Tegra4i version). The Tegra3 is used is tablets like Google's Nexus 7.

LTE is seen as a must have for next generation tablets and integrated on to the CPU rather than a separate radio chip.

The delay will give Qualcomm who are already market leaders in the integrated CPU market with their Snapdragon series of cores - and they already have a 4 core chip on the market which will be used in high-end devices like Samsung's Galaxy S4 (in Europe at least).

Though NVidia has been reasonably successful with its Tegra3 chip, it's been a difficult journey with them having to make significant re-designs along the way to fix design issues with the chip. Getting the Tegra4i right will mean long term cost savings.

NVidia introduces Tegra3

NVidia has starting showing off it's new Tegra3 ARM based system (code named Kal-El). It has 4 cores based on the Cortex-A9 architecture and a 12 core GForce graphics GPU which allows for hardware accelerated affects such as dynamic lighting, Flash Player 11, HTML5 and WebGL.

It can also output to HDMI and support NVidia's 3D Vision technology which converts OpenGL to stereo 3D for viewing on a 3D TV.

However the main advancement is that it offers 3 times the graphics performance while offering a 61% lower power consumption than the Tegra2. It achieves some of this by actually having 5 CPU cores (the 5th being a low power ARM variant) and only using the Cortex-A9 cores for intensive CPU applications, so when a system is just playing music or some other non-CPU intensive task the big cores are powered down. This is known as variable symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP) and is a technology patented by NVidia.

The Tegra3 will be used in a forthcoming tablet from ASUS known as the Asus EE Pad Transformer Prime.

Other ARM licensees such as Texas Instruments (TI) are already snapping at NVidia's heals with forthcoming high performance OMAP chips which will support technologies such as holographic displays, HD augmented reality, real time voice translation and natural speech interaction.

There are now more ARM processors than actual arms in the world now.

Qualcomm Snapdragons to snap ever faster

In an interview with Hexus by Luis Pineda, SVP of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, Qualcomm have indicated new versions of the Snapdragon processor (used in mobile devces like the HTC Touch HD2 and Google Nexus One).

Initially the Snapdragon 8X50A will come out which is a more compact version of the chip and lower power, but its speed increases to 1.3GHz, later the8X72 will be introduced which has two cores (ARM Scorpion) and runs at 1.5GHz.

The faster speed CPU's will allow decoding of HD video in 1080p format which will become prevalent on new tablet and slate devices (and high-end mobile phones).

Intel of course are also in the game with new versions of the Atom CPU on the table and it's use in a smartphone. Marvell has announced 4 core ARM chips and NVidia is also boasting multi-core mobile chips, Samsung are also offering their own CPUs.

The mobile market is likely to see more and more powerful 'superphones' (to use a phrase from Google) as computing power will no longer be the issue, now all they need to do is increase the battery life so these super fast devices actually stay alive all day.

NVIDIA speeds folding proteins

Stanford University has been running the Folding@Home project for a while. This uses a highly complex mathematical system to see how proteins fold, proteins that fold in a different manner are thought to be part of the process that leads to certain diseases.

NVIDIA GPUs are really highly optimised engines that can work on mathematical data in a very parallel manner (that's really what a lot graphics programming is). They have a programming interface into the GPUs and the NVIDIA folding@home client uses that interface. It can speed up mathematical operations by up to about 140x compared to a standard CPU.

A team running the NVIDIA client has moved to the top 0.1% of the folding@home teams in under a month.

Other mathematical solutions may also speed up drastically using this technology, unfortunately NVIDIA have charged for access to their CUDA libraries.

Apple released new Quad Core MacPros

Ahead of next week's MacExpo in SanFran Apple have updated their MacPros with new Quad Core CPUs. Each machine can take 2 processors (so that's 8 cores), 4 hard disks (SATA or SAS), 1 or 2 16x SuperDrives, an Airport (WiFi 802.11n) and a SAS RAID controller.

The stock video card is an NVIDIA 8800, but this can be downgraded to an ATI card. However the system can now hold 4 of the ATI cards allowing a MacPro to drive 4 cinema displays simultaneously. The top of the range card is an NVidia FX4600.

If buying one, wait until Apple announces their new Cinema displays which should be at MacExpo.