NVIDIA Tegra 4 and Project Shield (NVIDIA Handheld gaming "console" device)

Looks interesting, speed to market should be interesting as thats what matters most

Tegra 4 is brand new with quad-core A15 chip and Nvidia 72-core GPU and its only marginally faster than the A6X? C'mon now...

Looks very interesting.

Just a small note. You said this was the first A15 Quad-core CPU. But aren't the Snapdragon S4 Pro's also based on the A15?

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zbarvian said:

Tegra 4 is brand new with quad-core A15 chip and Nvidia 72-core GPU and its only marginally faster than the A6X? C'mon now...

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That is probably partially because of OS optimization.

strausd said:

Looks very interesting.

Just a small note. You said this was the first A15 Quad-core CPU. But aren't the Snapdragon S4 Pro's also based on the A15?

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That is probably partially because of OS optimization.

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Whatever the reason, it's sad. By all accounts, that chip should be twice as fast as the A6X. And Krait was based off A15, they aren't true A15 designs tho.

Here is more details on the Tegra 4 itself:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/06/nvidia-tegra-4-official/

You may want to add that into the original post.

If a Nexus 7 with a Tegra 4 comes out at the same price point, I will be all over that.

I'm pretty sure the Shield will fail.

You have the option to run 2 types of games with it:

1) Android games, which aren't anywhere close to console-quality, even by handheld gaming standards. There is literally not a single AA game out there. Most of the ones that would make sense being played without a touch screen are crappy, low-budget clones of existing console games that are 50x better.

2) PC games streamed through Wi-Fi. This could work but sadly Nvidia limited this feature to PCs with an Nvidia GTX 6xx GPU, meaning even a rMBP, which has a GT 650M with the latest GPU architecture from Nvidia (Kepler) wouldn't be enough. And that's not counting everybody with older generations or AMD GPUs. They're seriously limiting their audience there. Plus judging from the demo they did on stage, even if your computer does have a GTX 6xx GPU, it's not even guaranteed to work properly.

You can't expect consumers to buy a console that doesn't have any good game, and you can't expect developers to aim a console that doesn't have users. It's a vicious circle.

You can't just step into gaming like that. You need to make deals with game studios first so that you have some actually good games to offer. Whether they pay large developers to make ports of existing games (PSVita games?) to their console or simply buy some indie developers to make games for them (like Microsoft bought Bungie) is up to them, but you can't just launch a console like that without any game.

Honestly, the whole (yes, literally the whole) keynote was just awkward to look at. First the guy hypes up their crappy "automatic settings" software that they already announced months ago and doesn't impress no one, then he announces some OnLive clone showing some crappy game that doesn't even benefit from the power of the cluster. Apparently Nvidia won't even offer the streaming service themselves so they're just trying to sell the cluster to people who will offer streaming.

He then proceeds to the most awaited announcement (Tegra 4) failing completely to make us desire more performance in mobile devices. He does a couple bogus tech demoes like the Nexus 10 comparison where it uses Chrome while the Tegra 4 tablet used the stock browser. He then brings that fake "gamer girl" to take pictures and can't even himself differentiate an HDR image from a non-HDR one. He uses a fake, photoshopped image to prove that HDR snapshots are too slow and claims that an iPhone 5 takes 2 seconds to take the two snaps needed for HDR (really?). The pace was way too slow and he was just repeating the same meaningless sentences over and over again.

Then he announces this game console mentioning the wrong name "This is Project Thor, uh... Project Shield actually!), doesn't really show any game for more than 10 seconds, the thing is buggy (the home screen's background kept flickering/stretching), couldn't stream properly on stage, there was a bug in menus where the guy was stuck in a loop. He makes us assume the Shield is outputting 4K games while it's not. It's basically a game console without games, without a release date and without a price. They just used a chip they had already made with an OS they didn't make, didn't secure any deals for games, and the little software development they had to do was half-assed. How exciting.

Much more interesting than what Apple has offered up lately.

TEGRA 4 tablets are already available, as protos, at the CES
http://gizmodo.com/5973686/can-vizios-new-android-tablets-compete-with-nexus

I would love to see how those 72 GPU cores stack up graphically against the A6X's 4 cores....nothing has been able to beat Apple when it comes to pure graphics processing power - even without the optimization.....which makes me ask the question.....

If speed can be had with fewer cores, why are the people are NVIDIA simply adding ridiculous numbers of cores versus making the current number better/more powerful and efficient?

zbarvian said:

Tegra 4 is brand new with quad-core A15 chip and Nvidia 72-core GPU and its only marginally faster than the A6X? C'mon now...

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On the cpu side it not only slaughters the a6x, its kills its whole family. The exynos 5250 already salightered the a6 and a6x in that respect.

blackhand1001 said:

On the cpu side it not only slaughters the a6x, its kills its whole family. The exynos 5250 already salightered the a6 and a6x in that respect.

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Ya - the CPU side is where Apple's software/hardware optimization really comes through. They tend to be able to keep up with less....

Graphics are a completely different story - I obviously have no idea have any of it REALLY works - but I always find it crazy when NVIDIA releases a chip with a billion GPU cores and it's either spanked by an Apple chip or can barely keep up....

EDIT - Though I'm a huge fan of the "naming" of NVIDIA chips.....Tegra 3 = "Kal-El", this new Tegra 4 = "Wayne". Personally, I'm waiting to see how "Stark" does - that one will have to be a beast!

jrswizzle said:

Ya - the CPU side is where Apple's software/hardware optimization really comes through. They tend to be able to keep up with less....

Graphics are a completely different story - I obviously have no idea have any of it REALLY works - but I always find it crazy when NVIDIA releases a chip with a billion GPU cores and it's either spanked by an Apple chip or can barely keep up....

EDIT - Though I'm a huge fan of the "naming" of NVIDIA chips.....isn't the 4 "Kal-El"? Personally, I'm waiting to see how "Stark" does - that one will be a beast!

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We'll have to see the benchmarks but keep in mind that NVIDIAs cores are way way smaller than the a6x cores. Think of the nvidia cores like shader cores in their regular gpus. The total die area is still smaller than the a6x which means it will likely consume significantly less power than the a6x.

Yawn

WTF is the point of streaming a game from your PC to this thing? and as a stand alone console its useless as well

If I can access my ample Steam collection streamed from my PC whilst sitting on the couch I'll be a very happy, lazy man.

Consider me more than interested in this as I already stream games of Civilization V to my Nexus 7 using Splashtop.

Why didn't they just call it Project DOA?

How useful is that odd touchscreen? Seems like too flimsy to be useful and it looks like it was put on last minute.

syd430 said:

Why didn't they just call it Project DOA?

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Agreed, this thing's going to be a flop. Nintendo's got a new Pokemon series for the 3DS on the way, the Shield and the PS Vita are going to be fighting for scraps. Then again, Sony has the advantage of having their own established game studios and experience with making handhelds- I don't think the Shield will even come close to touching the Vita either.