NVIDIA's Tegra 3 is ready for consumption

NVIDIA has released their latest generation of System on Chip (SoC) under the label of Tegra 3, almost in tandem with ASUS’s announcement of ASUS’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime. NVIDIA is using an interesting configuration of cores with Tegra 3, which has set of four ARM Cortex A9 called high performance cores, and an additional Cortex A9 that will carry out the duties of a ‘companion core’.

 

This fifth core or the companion core has its clock speed limited to 500MHz; whereas the cluster of four main cores can swing between 1.3GHz and 1.4GHz. The companion core keeps the system humming when there is not user interaction or there is a low CPU requirement. The main set of cores only kick in while performing more CPU intensive tasks such as rendering web-pages, playing back videos or running a game. All this juggling between cores keeps the power consumption to a minimum. The real good news is that this switching of cores will be handled at the system level by NVIDIA’s firmware, independent of the operating system or the application. Following is a video demo of the 4-1 core configuration in action.