With all the hype surrounding what Apple is doing with the new A4 CPU, no one has heard of a company called Nvidia which produces excellent chips. Anyone heard of the snapdragon processor which is in the Nexus One, well they are the ones behind the architecture, which in my opinion is pretty damn sweet.
Tegra 2 is official and put simply, it looks awesome. NVIDIA estimates that it is four times faster than the original Tegra chip while staying in the same power and thermal envelope. And looking at the diagram, we can understand why: the chip combines 8 processors: two Arm Cortex A9, one ARM 7, an image processor, an HD video decode processor, an HD video encode processor, and audio processor and a graphics processor (GPU), phew! Thanks to all this power, NVIDIA says that it succeeds in playing local 1080p video and stream HD video (flash) where competitors like Qualcomm and Intel fail. And it does it while using less power. NVIDIA’s battery life estimate is 140+hrs for music playback, 12hrs for 1080p video playback and 6 hours of continuous HD web streaming. According to these numbers, Tegra 2 consumes about 7x less than Snapdragon. The chips will come in different packages to address markets like smartphones, multimedia players, automotive entertainment, but also smartbooks. Developer boards are already available.
I was all into the hype yesterday for the Steve Jobs Keynote. But after the about 60 minutes into the keynote it was just a regular presentation. Let me explain the iphone software is good on a phone but this device needs to be , no have more. The Apple iPad is a cool device don’t get me wrong but it gets pwned by a netbook which has a full blown operating system. The big problem I had was in trying to understand what the iPad was for: the answer, it seems, is everything. NOT!!!
Switched into ebook mode, the way the iPad emulates the printed page feels fairly natural, if not entirely on a par with rival ebook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle. The backlit screen doesn’t come anywhere near the clarity of electronic ink, which means it’s going to prove a lot harder on the eyes of bookworms(it’s great for reading in bed, one Apple flunky told me, keen to stress the positive side). But what it loses here, it makes up for with the addition of colour and even video.
