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NVIDIA Announces Tegra 4i(Project Grey)-With Integrated LTE and Phoenix Reference Design
It has been a while since we’ve heard anything about Project Grey, the first NVIDIA SoC with an integrated digital baseband, and the result of NVIDIA’s acquisition of soft-modem manufacturer Icera. Today, NVIDIA is ready to formalize Project Grey as Tegra 4i, and we have a bunch of information about this SoC and will obtain even more before MWC is upon us. NVIDIA’s roadmap from late 2011 put Grey in early 2013, and while other members of that roadmap haven’t necessarily stuck to the promised release schedule, Grey seems to be somewhere close to that schedule, at least as far as announcement and samples are concerned.
First, Tegra 4i includes the familiar 4+1 arrangement of cores we've seen since Tegra 3, but instead of Tegra 4's A15s, 4i includes ARM Cortex A9 CPUs running at a maximum single core clock of 2.3 GHz, we’re still waiting on a breakdown of the clock rates for dual and quad configuration, as well as the shadow core. NVIDIA has noted that it using R4 of ARM’s Cortex A9, which includes higher IPC thanks to the addition of a better data prefetching engine, dedicated hardware for cache preload instructions and some larger buffers. NVIDIA believes it is the first to implement the latest version of ARM's Cortex A9 core, however there's nothing stopping others from doing the same.
NVIDIA likely chose to integrate ARM's Cortex A9 r4 instead of the Cortex A15 to reduce power consumption and die size. While Tegra 4 is expected to be around 80mm^2, Tegra 4i measures in at around 60mm^2 including integrated baseband. NVIDIA isn't talking about memory interfaces at this point, but do keep in mind that your memory interface is often defined by the size of your die.
The 4i SoC is also built on TSMC’s 28 HPM process, interestingly enough not the 28 HPL process used for Tegra 4. As Tegra 4i appears to be geared towards hitting very high clock speeds, the use of TSMC's 28nm HPM process makes sense.
Tegra 4i also gets the exact same ISP and computational photography features that Tegra 4 includes, along with the same video encode and decode blocks. When it comes to the GPU side, 4i includes 60 GPU cores, that's just shy of the 72 in Tegra 4 proper. We’re waiting on additional detail to understand if these cores include the same enhancements we saw in Tegra 4 vs. Tegra 3. We also don't know the clock speed of the GPU cores in Tegra 4i.
| Tegra 4 Comparison | |||||||
| Tegra 4 | Tegra 4i | ||||||
| CPU Configuration | 4+1 ARM Cortex A15 | 4+1 ARM Cortex A9 "r4" | |||||
| Single CPU Max Clock | 1.9 GHz | 2.3 GHz | |||||
| Process | 28nm HPL | 28nm HPM | |||||
| GPU Cores | 72 | 60 | |||||
| Memory Interface | PCDDR3 and LPDDR3 | LPDDR3 | |||||
| Display | 3200x2000 | 1920x1200 | |||||
| Baseband | No Integrated Modem | Icera i500 | |||||
| Package | 23x23 BGA 14x14 FCCSP | 12x12 POP 12x12 FCCSP | |||||
Tegra 4i also includes the Icera i500 baseband IP block on-die, hence i for Icera. NVIDIA has disclosed some additional detail about i500 along the lines of what we’ve already written about. There’s full support for Category 3 (100 Mbps) LTE at launch, with a later upgrade to Category 4, along with support for 10 MHz + 10 MHz LTE carrier aggregation. In addition there’s support for the rest of the 3GPP suite of air interfaces, including WCDMA / HSPA+ up to 42 Mbps (Category 24), TD-SCDMA, and GSM/EDGE. i500 is also voice enabled with VoLTE support and CS-FB voice modes. NVIDIA claims that the i500 package is 7x7mm with a 6.5x6.5mm transceiver, and there are a total of 8 primary Rx ports (bands). NVIDIA also claims support for both 2x2 MIMO and 4x4 MIMO transmission modes on LTE.
Functionally Tegra 4i is more like a heavily upgraded Tegra 3 than a Tegra 4 part thanks to the Cortex A9s. It's clear that Tegra 4i is aimed more at the smartphone market while Tegra 4 proper aims at tablets or other platforms with a higher power budget and greater performance demands.
In terms of time frame, NVIDIA expects the first Tegra 4i designs to begin shipping at the end of 2013, with most devices appearing in Q1 of 2014. It'll be interesting to see how a Cortex A9 based design holds up in Q1 2014, although the newer core and very high clock speed should do a good job of keeping the SoC feeling more modern than you'd otherwise expect.
The other big announcement is a reference design built around Tegra 4i called Phoenix. It's a smartphone with Tegra 4i inside, 5-inch 1080p display, LTE, and just 8 mm of thickness. What's more impressive is that NVIDIA claims the reference design can be picked up by an OEM and ship with an unsubsidized price tag of between $100-$300 USD. With Phoenix NVIDIA now joins the likes of Qualcomm and Intel, both of whom already have active smartphone reference design programs.
We have a lot more questions about Tegra 4, 4i, and Phoenix, but answers are coming.
Sony just announced the PlayStation 4, along with some high level system specifications. The high level specs are what we've heard for quite some time:
Sony has confirmed the actual performance of the PlayStation 4's GPU as 1.84 TFLOPS. Sony claims the GPU features 18 compute units, which if this is GCN based we'd be looking at 1152 SPs and 72 texture units. It's unclear how custom the GPU is however, so we'll have to wait for additional information to really know for sure. The highest end PC GPUs are already faster than this, but the PS4's GPU is a lot faster than the PS3's RSX which was derived from NVIDIA's G70 architecture (used in the GeForce 7800 GTX, for example). I'm quite pleased with the promised level of GPU performance with the PS4. There are obvious power and cost constraints that would keep AMD/Sony from going even higher here, but this should be a good leap forward from current gen consoles.
Outfitting the PS4 with 8GB of RAM will be great for developers, and using high-speed GDDR5 will help ensure the GPU isn't bandwidth starved. Sony promised around 176GB/s of memory bandwidth for the PS4. The lack of solid state storage isn't surprising. Hard drives still offer a dramatic advantage in cost per GB vs. an SSD. Now if it's user replaceable with an SSD that would be a nice compromise.
Backwards compatibility with PS3 games isn't guaranteed and instead will leverage cloud gaming to stream older content to the box. There's some sort of a dedicated background processor that handles uploads and downloads, and even handles updates in the background while the system is off. The PS4 also supports instant suspend/resume.
The most intriuging thing is that the actual console has not been shown,only the internal details,controllers and how it works..
ST-Ericsson unveiled their latest 2.5GHz NovaThor L8580 CPU earlier in this year, but the company is now readying to showcase an even faster version of the chip at MWC 2013.
The four Cortex A9 cores residing in the NovaThor L8580 (or eQuad, as it's also dubbed) that's going to be on display at MWC are going to be clocked at 3GHz. In order to not drain the battery in a heartbeat, ST-Ericsson have build the chipset using the 28nm FD-SOI manufacturing technology.
The company has also utilized ModAp, which optimizes the execution of apps and as a result runs them up to 35% faster. The chip comes with support for dual cameras (of up to 20MP), HD Voice and LTE. The GPU is going to be of the PowerVR SGX544 variety clocked at 600MHz.
Naturally, the 3GHz NovaThor L8580 CPU in question is just a prototype at the moment, but hopefully, we'll get to play with it in Barcelona and put it through some benchmarking.
