Back in 2010 Nvidia released the world’s first ARM Cortex A9 dual core SoC called Tegra 2. After that, back in 2011 they announced the world’s first ARM Cortex A9 quad core called Tegra 3 which was manufactured under 40nm process. It was a huge success and still, most of the tablets and smartphones are powered by Tegra 3. This system on a chip had a 12 core GeForce GPU which can roughly produce 10 to 14 GLOPS, which wasn’t the best GPU compared to other SoCs at that time. However a few months back Nvidia announced the Tegra 4 (28nm) Cortex A15 quad core SoC which has 72 GPU cores and it can roughly produce 96 GFLOPS! If you compare that to the previous generation, this new chip has 6 to 7X improvement in GPU power and they didn’t stop there, in Antutu 3 benchmarks Tegra 4 CPU scored 36000 points while Tegra 3 scored only 12000.
You may know that Tegra 4 powered devices aren’t still out yet, but hopefully we will be able to see a device within 1 or 2 months. When it arrives it will surely be the world’s most powerful chip. However it is also quite interesting that a few days ago Nvidia CEO “Jen-Hsun Huang “showed off their upcoming Tegra 5 engineering sample which was running “Battlefield 3“. This new Tegra 5 (code named “Logan”) has a Kepler GPU inside. Gamers might be familiar with the Kepler GPUs as the powerful GTX Titan desktop VGA is powered by the Kepler architecture. Tegra 5 is a beast because it supports DirectX 11 with complicated shadows and lighting. Battlefield 3 is one of the most demanded PC games currently available, this game draws lot of GPU power. On a PC for example, if you are running this game at 720P high settings then you have to have at-least a GTX 4 series GPU to run it smooth. (Gamers would know)
As you can see from the above video, the smoothness of the graphics, the lighting, shadows and particles are truly awesome! Nvidia’s CEO explained “We want to get multiple years ahead of the competition, so the company made a strategic decision to delay other priorities in order to move Kepler Mobile forward” and while demoing the Battlefield 3 game he said “It had features such as high-dynamic-range lighting, while the latest iPad is capable of doing graphics that are “vintage 1999”. This is a bold statement because the iPad 4’s GPU is the most powerful GPU currently out there on handheld devices. However since Tegra 5 is still an engineering sample and might need at-least one year to get a stable release. Once released, it will surely be a treat and a big leap for mobile gaming. In the meantime we will have Tegra 4 to keep us entertained.
(Image credits: androidandme.com)
