AllThingsD » Tegra

Nvidia's Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways

Ina Fried — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:30:52 +0000

Well, the Tegra 3 is just full of surprises.

Nvidia has already disclosed that its quad-core chip also packs a low-power fifth core that can be used in place of the other four to save power. On Monday, Nvidia shared a few more secrets about its latest smartphone and tablet processor.

Among its other power-conserving superpowers is the ability to reduce the amount of backlighting needed. It does this by looking frame by frame at what is being displayed and, when possible, opening up pixels and turning down the backlight where possible.

“That adds a significant amount of battery life to these mobile devices,” Nvidia mobile unit head Mike Rayfield said in an interview, noting that backlights are one of the bigger drains on battery life. In addition to the backlight trick and the low-power core, Rayfield said the Tegra 3 also eliminates the need for a separate controller to process input on a touchscreen.

The Tegra 3 is already shipping in Asus’s Transformer Prime (a device first shown at AsiaD). At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia is showing the Tegra 3 in action on a bunch of other devices.

Nvidia isn’t the only chipmaker trying to make a case for its processors this week. Both Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs are slated to deliver keynote speeches on Tuesday.

All three companies are trying to make the case for why their processors should be the brains of device makers’ next mobile gadgets. And they aren’t the only ones: Texas Instruments, MediaTek and Broadcom are also angling for different segments of the market.

Solid Keyboard Elevates This Tablet, Though Software Lags

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:03:52 +0000

One of the biggest things that deters people from relying on tablets is the lack of a convenient physical keyboard. Now, Taiwan-based Asus is attacking this issue with a new Android-based tablet and accompanying keyboard dock, due on store shelves in the U.S. on Dec. 15.

[ See post to watch video ]

This 10-inch tablet, called the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, starts at $499, the same price as the market leader, Apple’s iPad 2. But it has twice the memory—32 gigabytes—at that price. The keyboard dock, with an additional battery and added ports, is an optional extra for $149.

The new Asus has another notable feature: It is the first tablet to use a new processor from chip maker Nvidia that has four cores, double what other recent tablets use.

Asus and Nvidia, which developed the product jointly, claim this processor, called the Tegra 3, offers more power when it’s needed, and the flexibility to sip less power when it’s not, for overall better performance and battery life. I expect this same chip to show up in other tablets in coming months.

I’ve been testing the Transformer Prime, and I found it to be the best standard Android tablet I’ve used. In my tests, the Prime had snappy performance, and decent battery life, though less than the iPad’s (more on that later). It is a tad lighter and thinner than the iPad 2 and has a sharp, pleasant screen.

The Transformer Prime tablet starts at $499. Keyboard dock is an extra $149.

Plus, when the tablet is coupled with the keyboard dock, by nestling it into a hinge, it becomes the screen of what is essentially an Android netbook. When docked, the tablet even folds down over the keyboard like a lid. I found typing on the keyboard to be easy and accurate.

However, as with all other tablets based on Google’s Android platform, its weak point is software. The tablet-oriented Honeycomb version of Android on the Prime isn’t as slick or smooth as the iPad’s operating system, though the Prime’s potent processor makes it more fluid than is typical on such Android devices. And Google’s Android Market offers only a small number of tablet-optimized apps, compared with 140,000 for the iPad.

The Transformer Prime

In addition, the Prime lacks access to a large, unified ecosystem of music, videos and books, unlike the Apple or Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It does offer Google’s new music store, and a movie-rental service. But, when I tried to rent two movies, neither would play.

The Prime will gain a fresh version of the Android operating system, called Ice Cream Sandwich, early next year, according to Asus. The company says early buyers of the Prime will be able to upgrade for free.

Fans of the iPad will point out that it, too, can work with optional physical keyboards. But Apple doesn’t make one that couples with the iPad 2 the way the Asus docking station mates with its tablet, and the extra battery in the Prime’s keyboard dock can supposedly add up to six hours of unplugged power, a claim I didn’t test. The Prime’s dock also has a USB port and a memory card slot.

The Prime is actually the third try by Asus to mate a tablet with a physical keyboard. An earlier, bulkier version of the Transformer wasn’t embraced by many consumers, and a thick tablet with a cramped slide-out keyboard, called the Slider, also hasn’t been a big hit. But Asus is hoping that the slimmer, lighter Prime and its dock will do the trick.

The Transformer Prime, when coupled with the keyboard dock, can fold down like a lid.

The stand-alone tablet is 0.33-inch thick and weighs 1.29 pounds. The dock adds 1.18 pounds and 0.4-inch of thickness. Together, they cost $648, just $49 more than the cheapest 32 GB iPad, but hundreds more than many standard 10-inch Windows netbooks.

The companies are stressing how the processor improves the graphics and speed of games on the tablet, and boast that the Prime can be used with gaming-console controllers. This is good news for tablet gamers, and, in my tests, some sample games the companies provided looked impressive. But I wasn’t blown away with their superiority over iPad games.

To me, the keyboard dock is the big story here. I found it to be a solid companion. Its keys were well spaced despite the unit’s small overall size, and the hinge that holds the tablet as a removable screen was sturdy. Special keys control Android functions such as Home, Back and Search. And there’s a roomy, responsive touch pad.

The screen was responsive and the speakers were good. In my tests, email, Web browsing, and streaming of music and videos worked well over good Wi-Fi connections. But the Prime lacks any cellular connectivity, meaning it is crippled when you’re out of Wi-Fi range. When I tested it at a hotel with slow Wi-Fi, the Prime was notably pokier at streaming the same YouTube video as an iPad 2 using Verizon’s 3G cellular network.

Gauging the battery life on this tablet is a bit complicated. I performed the same battery test I have used for every tablet since the original iPad appeared. In that test, I set the screen brightness to 75%, leave the wireless on and play locally stored videos back to back till the unit dies.

The Transformer Prime lasted just shy of seven hours, compared with slightly more than 10 hours for the iPad 2, a big difference. Still, that seven hours was better than many other full-size Android tablets have achieved in this test.

Asus and Nvidia build in three battery modes, and I tested only the one called Normal. Unfortunately, Nvidia now says that nomenclature is misleading, and that Normal is really meant for only high-performance tasks. So, early next year, when it switches to the next version of Android, it plans to rename Normal as “Performance,” to steer users to a less power-hungry mode called “Balanced.” I can’t say how the Prime’s battery will perform in that scenario with the new OS.

I still believe the iPad 2 is the best overall tablet available. However, if you’re looking for a model using Google’s Android interface and are yearning for a well-designed, easily integrated keyboard solution, or want to play more power-hungry games, the Transformer Prime is a good choice, as long as you can tolerate its software limitations.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Nvidia Earnings, Revenue Nudge Past Estimates on Strong Graphics and Mobile Business

Ina Fried — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:24:09 +0000

Nvidia on Thursday reported quarterly earnings that were just ahead of what analysts were expecting.

The chipmaker said it earned $178.3 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $1.07 billion for the three months ended Oct. 30. Nvidia had been expected to post earnings of around 26 cents per share, on revenue of $1.06 billion, according to First Call.

For the current quarter, Nvidia said it sees its revenue staying roughly flat from the current quarter, give or take a percentage or two. Gross margins are expected to be steady or up half a percent.

“NVIDIA’s strategy is coming into its own, as the world becomes increasingly visual and mobile,” CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in a statement. “Our GPU business accelerated in the third quarter, driven by strong demand from gamers and the professional market. And our mobile business benefited from new devices coming onto the market.”

Earlier this week, the company announced it is ready with its quad-core Tegra 3 chip, which will show up first in Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime next month, and in other tablets and phones next year.

“With Tegra 3 phone wins well ahead of Tegra 2’s pace, we’re expecting strong growth in the year ahead,” Huang said.

For more on Nvidia, here’s what Huang had to say at our recent AsiaD conference:

[ See post to watch video ]

Nvidia's Quad-Core Tegra 3 Ready, Asus' Transformer Prime Almost Ready

Ina Fried — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:20:12 +0000

For those who have been waiting for a mobile device with a quad-core chip, the wait is over. Well, almost over.

Nvidia is announcing on Wednesday that it is ready with its Tegra 3 chip, previously known by its Kal-El code name. However, the first device running the chip, Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime, won’t be shipping until December.

The Asus tablet is set to go on sale for $499 for a 32 gigabyte model and $100 more for a 64GB version, with the optional plug-in keyboard dock priced at $149. Despite some hopes it would ship with Google’s new Ice Cream Sandwich edition of Android, the tablet will initially come loaded with Android 3.2. An upgrade should be available in December, Asus said.

As for Nvidia’s chip, the company claims it will offer three times the graphic performance while offering 61 percent more battery life — meaning up to 12 hours of HD video playback on a single charge. The Tegra 3 name will come as no surprise to AllThingsD readers, as CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used it on stage at AsiaD. Asus CEO Jonney Shih also showed off the Transformer Prime during his appearance at our Hong Kong conference.

Although touted as a quad-core processor, the chip also includes a fifth processing core that can be used in place of the four main cores to run devices in a lower power state. Phones running the chip, along with more tablets, are due next year.

Nvidia first announced its plans for Kal-El at Mobile World Congress back in February.

The company, naturally, isn’t stopping with Tegra 3. Its road map shows a chip code-named Wayne due next year, with roughly double the performance; follow-on chips “Logan” and “Stark” are due in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and promise logarithmically better performance.

Sprint and Motorola Renew Their Vows With Plans for High-End Photon 4G

Ina Fried — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:09:09 +0000

Sprint and Motorola pledged their commitment to one another at a New York event on Thursday, announcing plans for Sprint and its various brands to release 10 Motorola devices this year, including two it showed off at the event.

The star of the show is the Photon 4G, which packs a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 4.3-inch screen, the Gingerbread version of Android and an eight megapixel camera, as well as the ability to plug into a laptop dock, a la the Motorola Atrix.

The other device shown Thursday was the Motorola Triumph, the first Motorola device exclusive to Sprint’s Virgin Mobile prepaid brand. The thin 4.1-inch touchscreen device has HDMI output and the ability to capture 720p video.

Sprint and Motorola said the devices would be available this summer, but didn’t announce pricing or exact availability.

Motorola has been a longtime partner for Sprint’s Nextel brand, but its Android smartphones have been more closely tied with Verizon, where Motorola has powered many of that carrier’s Droid devices. To underscore the partnership, Thursday’s announcement featured Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha along with Sprint Chief Executive Dan Hesse.

Acer's Iconia Honeycomb Tablet Notable for Price Tag, if Not Features

Ina Fried — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 18:55:47 +0000

Taiwanese computer maker Acer announced pricing and availability plans on Friday for its Honeycomb tablet, the Iconia Tab A500. The tablet is available for pre-order from Best Buy and will go on sale on April 20 for a $450 suggested price.

Its Nvidia Tegra chip, dual cameras, 10.1 inch screen makesand other features make it sound, well, like a lot of other Honeycomb tablets, albeit with perhaps the lowest sticker price to date.

Aiming to Power Ever More Complex Graphics, Nvidia Plans Quad-Core Mobile Chip This Year

Ina Fried — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:14 +0000

Chipmaker Nvidia plans this year to introduce a four-core processor, code-named Project Kal-El, that should offer roughly five times the processing power of its existing Tegra chip and, what it says, has significantly more horsepower than an Intel Core 2 Duo chip.

Briefing reporters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nvidia said it plans to include a 12-core graphics processor along with the quad-core CPU. All that processing oomph should support “Extreme HD” graphics with a resolution of up to 2,560 by 1,600 pixels. The chip is now sampling to customers, Nvidia said.

The company has more ambitious goals for subsequent years, with plans to more than double performance in each of the next three years with chips code-named Wayne, Logan and Stark.

Nvidia’s current Tegra 2 chip is at the heart of many Android phones and a number of Android Honeycomb tablets, including the Motorola Xoom, LG G-Slate and the just-introduced Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

However, Nvidia isn’t the only company ramping things up. Qualcomm announced a new series of ARM-based chips on Monday, though its quad-core chip isn’t slated to arrive until 2012.

For more on Nvidia’s plans for the future, check out the onstage interview I did with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at our D@CES event in January.

[ See post to watch video ]

D@CES Today: Twitter, Nvidia, Microsoft in the Vegas Spotlight!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:00:12 +0000

First things first, for those emailing me frantically about getting into our D@CES onstage interview event later today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: We’re sold out and have a very long wait list.

That said, people in Sin City tend to flake out, so if you show up at the Marcello Ballroom at the Venetian Hotel at 3 pm, you might snag a seat, as people did last year at the same event.

No guarantees, but it’s a betting town, so you might want to do so.

And, if you throw craps, our crack All Things Digital staff will be posting photos, reports and video quickly.

I am hoping there will be some juicy news for them to chew on, as we interview three fascinating subjects:

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer browser team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Our latest event comes after our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference, part of the D: All Things Digital juggernaut.

(Actually, it is more like a tiny red wagon, but it is really cool.)

This is our second D event at the CES, which is taking place this week.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

As usual, our event will be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

The D@CES program is only this afternoon, with the new trio.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real, live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

As noted before, I will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

So get ready for some fun–after all, it’s Vegas, baby.

D@CES: What Happens to Twitter's Dick Costolo in Vegas Stays on ATD

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:10:14 +0000

After our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week, the D: All Things Digital train keeps chugging away and is now headed to Las Vegas just after the new year.

There, we will do a second D event at the Consumer Electronics Show, which will take place from January 6 to 9, 2011.

It will, natch, be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

Unlike our other conferences, the D@CES program is only one afternoon, on Friday, January 7, at the Venetian’s Marcello ballroom, followed by a party at the hotel’s V Bar.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

This year, the trio will be: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real-live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

BoomTown will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

D@CES is invitation only, but if you want to go, email me at Kara@AllThingsD.com and I will send an invite, as long as supplies last.

Nvidia CEO: Like iPad, "Magical" Android Tablets Will "Surprise and Delight"

John Paczkowski — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:15:21 +0000

Apple, Steve Jobs likes to say, works very hard to “surprise and delight” its customers with “magical” products.

And so does Google, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who lauded the company’s recent tablet efforts with some Jobsian descriptives Thursday.

Discussing Nvidia’s Tegra chip during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Huang said we’ll see Google and its partners bring some killer Android tablets to market in the months ahead.

“Although they’re a little bit behind, the work that Andy Rubin’s team is doing at Google is just really amazing,” Huang said. “I mean, this is clearly a world-class engineering team. And they’re building a magical product. So I’m looking forward to the next generation of Android phones and tablets that are coming out. And I think it’s going to really, really surprise people and delight consumers everywhere.”

A magical product…that surprises and delights. Works for Jobs, right?

Well, at least he didn’t say “magical and revolutionary.”

LG Goes With Nvidia Chip in New Smartphones

Roger Cheng — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:00:09 +0000

LG Electronics on Thursday confirmed that it would be using a dual-core processor manufacturered by Nvidia for its line of Optimus smartphones later this year. That’s a coup for Nvidia (NVDA), which has been pushing to enter the smartphone market with its Tegra chip and expand beyond its traditional business of providing graphics chips for PCs.

So far, the most notable phone to use Tegra was Microsoft’s (MSFT) failed Kin youth-centric device. But LG committing to Nvidia gives the graphics-chip maker something to potentially boast about. Much of the awareness of the faster generation of 1-gigahertz processors for smartphones have focused on Qualcomm Inc.’s (QCOM) Snapdragon processor, found in HTC’s Incredible and Evo, or Samsung Electronics’s Hummingbird chip, found in its own line of Galaxy S phones.

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Is Microsoft About to Launch Its Own Mobile Phone? (Updated)

Eric Savitz — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:31:26 +0000

Well, everyone else is in the phone business, so why not Microsoft (MSFT)?

There are several reports suggesting that the company may soon do exactly that.

On Friday, tech news site TheInquirer.net reported that the company is developing a phone that will use an Nvidia processor called Tegra. The phone supposedly will be launched at the 3GSM conference this coming February.

Today, CNBC offered a slightly different version of the Microsoft phone rumor, asserting that the company will create a Zune-based phone code-named “Pink,” which could be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. There have been rumors about the nature of the company’s “Project Pink” going back at least a year; back in May, ZDNet reported that Pink consists of a set of consumer-focused premium mobile services, including some from its Danger acquisition.

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