NVIDIA, ARM, Tegra 3, and Beyond

[Piggie]

A nice & interesting 2 page article recently written that explains the state of play regarding Tegra, Arm CPU/GPU's and where we are going with all of this in the near future:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1072

 

[Gryzor]

Oh dear...do we really need to be told how in the future things are going to get more powerful, more efficient etc. Tegra3 will be better than Tegra2...shock horror.

It has got to a point where the power of these devices is more than adequate, and the focus is quite rightly on aesthetics and functionality, at least where Apple is concerned anyway.

 

[JulianL]

It has got to a point where the power of these devices is more than adequate...

It depends how far into the future you look and what applications you're looking to run. If one starts looking at continuous speaker-independent speech recognition input to fairly unconstrained and genuinely robust digital assistants (question answering systems that can enter into a dialog to refine imprecise input and take actions such as booking things; very much the sort of thing that would be good in a mobile lifestyle device) then I would say that we're probably looking at something like 4 orders of magnitude increase in computer power (i.e. a 10,000-fold increase) to get close.

For instance look at IBM's Watson (http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.shtml). That's running on 2880 cores, each of which is far more powerful than a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A9, and it has 15TB of total RAM to play with. And that's for a domain that is constrained to the Jeopardy format which allows it to avoid dealing with a whole slew of issues (resolving cross-sentence pronoun references and dealing with focus shifts within a dialog, to name just two).

There really are some very hard problems out there that we are a long way from solving at all, let alone hosting on a handheld device.

- Julian

 

[Piggie]

Oh dear...do we really need to be told how in the future things are going to get more powerful, more efficient etc. Tegra3 will be better than Tegra2...shock horror.

It has got to a point where the power of these devices is more than adequate, and the focus is quite rightly on aesthetics and functionality, at least where Apple is concerned anyway.

Perhaps you may have stood there next to an Atari PONG machine and thought why do they need to do any more than this, this is great fun, why don't they just leave things as they are, "this is more than adequate"

But back then you had never seen Quake, Call of Duty, Crysis, Half Life etc etc.......

If we had that attitude we would still be living in caves. As cavemen probably thought at the time they were "more than adequate" as they knew no better.