Nvidia Quietly Pre-Announces Tegra 3+ System-on-Chip

From X-bit Labs: Nvidia Corp. has quietly pre-announced Tegra 3+ system-on-chip, which is projected to improve performance of the unit unveiled in November, 2011. The new SoC is expected to be available this year and will let Nvidia's partners to refresh their smartphone and tablets lineups later this year.

Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile business unit, revealed on Thursday a new Tegra roadmap that includes an updated Tegra 3+ system-on-chip that is set to be available sometimes in 2012, reports web-site. While no exact details are known about Tegra 3+, it is natural to expect it to bring better performance amid similar power consumption thanks to clock-speed boost and optimizations.

It is not really common for consumer electronics makers to refresh system-on-chips without tangible improvements. Nonetheless, since Nvidia's Tegra 3 is among the most powerful SoCs for mobile devices nowadays, it makes some sense for the company to introduce a higher performance version to maintain performance leadership and let its partners to create new classes of devices or add new capabilities to existing products.

Nvidia Tegra 3 "Kal-El" system-on-chip (SoC) is based on four high-performance Cortex-A9 general-purpose cores with Neon accelerators (1.4GHz single-core or 1.30GHz quad-core mode) and one power-optimized Cortex-A9 core (up to 500MHz), features a GeForce graphics processing unit with twelve stream processors and will have a new display and video engines capable of supporting Blu-ray disc video playback and stereo-3D graphics output. The new device integrates single-channel DDR3L-1500/LPDDR2-1066 memory controller, e.MMC 4.41, SD 3.0, SATA II, 7.1-channel audio controller, faster image signal processor and so on. According to Nvidia's own performance benchmarks, Tegra 3 is 50% - 200%+ faster than Tegra 2 in various applications.

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