He also took the wrap off Project Shield, a gaming controller-shaped 5-inch portable gaming device that is built on the new generation of Tegra 4 chip in what the company said is the company’s first game device roll-out.
Built with ARM quad-core Cortex-A15, 72 Nvidia GeForce GPU cores, and its power-saving and low-energy core, the Tegra 4 outraces every other mobile CPUs available on the market, when it comes to Web-loading speed.
Combined with a programmable 4G LTE radio modem chip, the Tegra 4 is the company’s first 4G LTE integrated chip, too.
Especially, the Tegra 4 chip boasts 6 times as powerful GPU horse power as its predecessor Tegra 3, delivering 4K, or UHD quality image processing capability.
“The first question that I like to answer is how fast does fast have to be. Why is it that is not fast enough. To show you that, I bring the world’s fastest tablet Samsung Nexus 10 tablet. What I am going to do is to put the Nexus and Tegra 4(based tablet) on foot race to load 25 Web pages. I don’t know how mnay of you know loading Web pages is just snappier” Jen-Hsun Huang said
His benchmark test showed that Tegra 4 loaded 25 unique Web pages in a matter of 27 seconds, while it took Samsung Nexus 10 50 seconds.
“ If you load a Web page with Tegra 4, it takes one second, basically. If you load a Web page with the fastest Android tablet Nexus 10, it takes 2 seconds, I think one second is twice faster than 2 seconds. Compared with other tablets, Tegra 4 is the world’s fastest applications processor in the world, today,” he continued.
According to him, Tegra 4 is faster than iPhone 4, which runs on one of the fastest CPU. The Tegra 4 also proves to outrace Droid DNA, which runs on Qualcomm 8064, and Kindle Fire HD which is built around TI OMAP 4470. The Nexus 10 runs on Samsung Electronics’ Exynos 5250.
Whizzing up, but just sipping power
On average, the Tegra 4 is 2 to 3.5 times faster than the Android tablets.
The integration of what’s called as Computational Photography Architecture algorithm engine is another edge that the Tegra 4 has over other competing mobile CPU solutions.
The engine is to accelerate the performance and speed of high dynamic range, or HDR engine by making the maximum use of all processing powers of the GPU, CPU and the camera's image-signal processor.
HDR is a sort of image compensation algorithm that aligns two images –low light exposure and high light exposure –to compensate for low, or high light background exposures.
By using the computational photography engine, the Tegra 4 chip helps the HDR to process image frame 10 times faster than normal HDR engine, which takes 2 seconds per frame.
World's first SDR LTE modem chip
Nvidia’s first programmable 4G LTE modem chip –Icera i500 -made another breakthrough.
Termed as the world’s first software-defined radio modem chip, the i500 network processor is programmable so that it is very flexible in meeting changes in the network physical layer standard and security protocols. In addition, its silicon footprint is 40% smaller than that of conventional modems, delivering four times the processing capability of its predecessor.
The company will be sampling the i500 4G LTE modem chip this month.
Designed for maximum energy efficiency, Tegra 4 includes a second-generation battery saver core for low power during standard use, and PRISM 2 Display technology to reduce backlight power, while delivering superior visuals. The power saving core mostly process low computing requirement tasks like Web browsing, helping other 4 cores save power.
Tegra 4 consumes up to 45% less power than its predecessor, Tegra 3, in common use cases. And it enables up to 14 hours of HD video playback on phones.