CES 2012: Nvidia unveils Tegra 3 at Consumer Electronics Show

With Intel announcing its intention to take on ARM for the lucrative smartphone and tablet market, Nvidia believes it can compete by offering low cost, pc class performance levels, better battery life and improved mobile experiences. The Tegra 3 chip will debut in the Asus Transformer Prime tablet, a 7in device that runs Android 4.0 will cost around £160. Previously known as 'Project Kal-El', the Tegra 3 processor provides up to 3x the graphics performance of Tegra 2, and up to 61% lower power consumption. This, says NVIDIA, translates into an industry leading 12hours of battery life for hd video playback. The processor implements a new, patent pending technology known as Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP). vSMP includes a fifth cpu 'companion', specifically designed for work requiring little power. The four main cores are designed for work requiring high performance, and, according to NVIDIA, generally consume less power than dual core processors. During tasks that require less power, the Tegra 3 processor completely shuts down its four performance tuned cores and uses its companion core instead. For high-performance tasks, the Tegra 3 processor disables the companion. "NVIDIA's fifth core is ingenious," said Nathan Brookwood, Research Fellow at Insight 64. "Tegra 3's vSMP technology extends the battery life of next generation mobile devices by using less power when they're handling undemanding tasks and then ratcheting up performance when it's really needed." The Tegra 3 quad core cpus are complemented with a new 12 core NVIDIA GeForce gpu, which is designed to deliver more realism with dynamic lighting, physical effects and high resolution environments. It also has support for 3d stereo. NVIDIA says the Tegra 3 processor provides an experience comparable to that of a game console, offering full game controller support, enabling consumers to play games on a tablet or connect to hdtvs. The company says the processor provides the industry's fastest web experience, with accelerated Adobe Flash Player 11, HTML5 and WebGL browsing, and an optimised Javascript engine. "The Eee Pad Transformer Prime is a category defining product. Powered by Tegra 3, it launches us into a new era of mobile computing, in which quad core performance and super energy efficiency provide capabilities never available before," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer, NVIDIA.