Samsung confirms a Tegra-based smartphone is in the works, all other details shrouded in mystery
By Ross Miller 
posted Jul 24th 2009 3:54PM
posted Jul 24th 2009 3:54PM
posted Jul 24th 2009 3:54PM
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
what's the point of a HD processor in a device which doesn't even have a screen anywhere near a HD resolution? not even 720p
Because most phones can't handle playing VGA video smoothly. The extra graphics oomph would help greatly.
@Al
It's for the HDMI output.
So you can output your phones screen to your TV....
Output to a HDTV?
Oh yeah plus no need for converters or anything to get a video on your phone. You most likely will be able to drag and drop a HD file to your phone and play it with no hassle...
You're right, they shouldn't use a fast processor. Nobody likes those.
I don't see a point of a connection to a HDTV. battery life will be shit guessing like 15mins of hd video play back lol. also anyone thought about hte heat generated? its gonna be a quite a thick phone for the heatsink on the tegra processor!
ben: nah there's no need for this HD processor since the display isn't good enough. its like hooking up a HD feed to a ancient analogue TV
Also, don't forget about ARhrrrr, the augmented reality zombie game. Stuff like this looks like a lot of fun..
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/16/tegra-might-power-zune-hd-definitely-does-augmented-zombie-real/
As already mentioned it is supposed to output 1080P files to your TV.
What nobody has mentioned though is each 1080P file is 10GB in size and thats a crappy compressed AVI file.
So basically you get to transfer 1080P video to the SD card inside your phone which at 10GB for a compressed AVI file would take half an hour and then you get to connect your cellphone to your TV and watch compressed video.
In reality its nothing but a buzz word the 1080P video playback is completely and utterly useless and Tegra is way overpowered for any sort of GUI you can throw at it. If they make a GUI that can make use of all the unified rendering pipelines(at least I think they are unified) your battery life will be gone pretty quickly.
The reason Tegra is interesting is because if the market does exist for it then it is possible they could create a Tegra that is quite powerful yet has a very small TDP.
Another way to look at it is the current Tegra is supposed to be 65nm but when they shrink it to 40nm it will be quite a bit faster and have half the TDP. If they shrink it even further to 32nm it consumes even less power while producing less heat and being more powerful.
The devices with the current Tegra are destined failures but the next generation of Tegra devices that most of the smarter manufacturers are waiting for are only around the corner and will be vastly superior to any devices shipping with this dinosaur of a processor.
If you want a Tegra device wait for TSMC to start putting out 45nm GPU's the Tegra will come somewhere along the line and be much superior to the one in these current devices.
/nerdrant
@Ben
Not when it means a huge cut in battery life.
People, Tegra is not solely about HD video so stop bitching about it. @Justin: What is your source that it will cause "a huge cut in battery life." ? Or did you just peer into your magic crystal ball?
Hey tony, stop talking out of your ass. Many 1080 rips come in as 8gb mp4 files in mkv containers. Some even 4gb(with not so great quality though). Besides, what's wrong with using this to play 720p, which are usually 4gb. Is it really unheard of having enough space for the files if recent devices hold 32? 64 and eventually 128 are coming fast. Using a phone to play 1080p is completely plausible, and would be a feature that I welcome.
TEGRA FTW this should be a fast grafic based smartphone... njt laggy I hope...
Ooooo, throw Android on this and you've got a new top of the line smartphone.
It has to be android. (i hope). T-mobiles main focuse right now is android and they would'nt come out with a device to hurt the sales of their flag ship device.
Olso tegra was never demoed on windows mobile. Just windows CE and Android.
Android!!!!!!!!!!
Windows Mobile is based on Windows CE, so I think we will see a Tegra based Window Mobile phone before seeing it on Android. Maybe Windows Mobile 7 minimum requirements will include Tegra chips and capacitive screens...
It'll be Android or Symbian Foundation.
Tegra was originally designed for Windows Mobile. They got an Android device or two working with Tegra, but it wasn't optimized yet, and was actually sluggish and unimpressive at the time. I think the OS is up in the air right now. It could be a 50/50 between WinMo and Android.
TEGRA, OLED, QWERTY, 512+RAM, 3.5mm, microSD, and Android is the perfect package. Don't screw this up for me Samsung, thanks.
Throw away QWERTY and make WinMo as option and I'll be happier :P
Make sure its the multitouch resistive screen that can be used with glass and a brush and its totally perfect package for OLED touchscreen keyboard.
Not everyone uses QWERTY, I use ЙЦУКЕН and it doesn't fit on QWERTY kb - not enough buttons. So I prefer devices with big touch-recognizing screen instead - all buttons fit there.
just remember using OLED or android means a lower resolution then the other phones with big screens on the market.
Anyway whats so fantastic about Tegra? I am sure the Xperia X2 is going to be better then this with possibly an OLED + Android (donut) + Snapdragon (1Ghz) + wicked look. = Win.
Change to winmo and put Dual Micro SDHC Slots on it!
A lot of pleople that have posted on this page don't know much about tegra.
You people need to read more about its power and battery life!
Where is pre-order button?
Keep checking your junk e-mail folder, I'm sure you'll see it soon.
Tegra/Snapdragon/OMAP3 phone running Android on a GSM network please!
yes/yes/yes
I would switch to any carrier for this....even Ver..i.... Ugh. Can't say it.
An HD phone? What's the point?
The point is to show that if the phone can handle HD resolutions then it can handle anything else you can throw at it.
Faster processor= better performance.
= crappy battery
@Magallanes: Actually, the battery life for Tegra devices are suppose to be quite exceptional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5sEIf5-FJs
Thanks for playing!
Which is better...Tegra or Snapdragon?
My understanding was that Snapdragon is just a really powerful CPU (1GHz) and Tegra is a CPU + GPU combo... I think Tegra will be better for everyday use, since some of CPU's load will be offloaded on to GPU and make the graphical elements more smooth.
Plus, after using an HTC phone for a year I've lost all faith in Qualcomm's ability to make good chipsets. Snapdragon will probably find a way to get sluggish - like on the Toshiba TG01..
Tegra is said to be able to play music for 100 hours, HD video for 10 hours.
Can Snapdragon do the same? I highly doubt it - it has a very high clock. Higher clock = more mhz = more battery use, but not always more performance (depends on software and task).
I'd say Tegra is superior but thats my opinion. I have yet to see what snapdragon can do.
@shinigami
I thought it was around 21 days worth of music on a single charge? (21x24 = 504 hours) In any event, the playback times for video and audio are indeed impressive (been looking forward to the tegra chipset to come to hand helds for the past year and a half ), but probably the bigger questions (at least mine) remain are what X mAH batteries will be used (judging from todays lack of quality, i wouldnt be surprised to see a 100-200 mAH battery in there) and how much talk time one would get on a single charge
Tegra is supposed to be better because of the way it handles power consumption, it is designed to turn off the parts of the system that are not currently in use. So if the graphics proicessing portions of the platform are not being utilized then they are completely off. Its not a processor but a unified platform .
There is an oler article on my site that goes over the whole thing, full specs features etc - plus it gives the specs of the dev module you will have seen in the Youtube videos. It's actually still on the front page. http://www.notascoolasitseems.com .
@ilikespie
You don't listen to music 24 hours straight. Calculation was done on that base.
The point of Tegra is the performance...
Obviously you won't have an HD resolution, but if I can put one of my hundreds of high definition h.264 encoded videos and play it smoothly without having to bother with transcoding, why not?
The processor is for more than just HD, it's for graphics performance.
So yes, lots of ram, and Android please.
Please no Winmo, biggest piece of s** ever
I still don't understand the hate. I haven't had many issues with it and 6.5 is even better than 6.1.
I'll take WinMo over Android any day. Android has yet to impress me or live up to the hype.
Windows Mobile! Windows Mobile! Windows Mobile! Windows Mobile!
battery life is one of them sellers of tegra. obviously you idiots have been in a cave for the last 6 months. the netbook tested woth windows ce and tegra did hd video for 9 hours without a charge.
Give it Android and I will buy it. First Android phone since the G1 I want to own. Why? Keyboard of course.
looks to me as the glyde 2
so many smart phone coming out lately. the 2 agreement is no longer an option to keep up. we need to switch to 6 months to be fair. I am willing to sell my soul 2 times a year. once every 2 is not working out for me.
Bye bye Samsung i8910 aka Omnia HD
ofcourse tegra is extremely fast for a phone, but IMO the main point is long battery life.
A phone doesn't need that much processing power but it's certainly sweet if it can live for a couple of days with one charge (unlike toshiba TG01). This is what nvidia is saying. Hope it's true...
"That's not a lot to go on, but knowing the capabilities of the CPU, we're excited. "
What? Do you even know the details of the Tegra? Although it is dual-core, it uses two *ARM11* cores clocked at about 600mhz. Two ARM11 cores at 600mhz are capable of about ~1200 DMIPS. A single 600mhz Cortex-A8 can also do about 1200DMIPS, and uses a *less power* than two ARM11 cores clocked at the same speed.
Just as important, ARM11 doesn't have a real SIMD capability (it just uses the same instruction for multiple data units, but computes the data units *sequentially*, not in parallel. The "NEON" component in the Cortex-A8 is the first powerful dual-issue SIMD engine. The Cortex-A8 can also scale up to 1000Mhz and beyond, particularly when manufactured at 45nm (OMAP36xx, Snapdragon v2, etc.)
Finally, even if they have the same raw computational ability, and are not using SIMD, the Cortex-A8 should run individual applications faster than two ARM11 cores because the vast majority of cellphone applications are not multi-threaded well, and certainly the operating systems like Windows Mobile, Android, OSX, WebOS are not optimized well (yet) for multiple cores.
Now, I am NOT anti-Nvidia. The Tegra's cutting-edge GPU may make up for the processor versus Cortex-A8 phones like the Pre, iPhone 3GS, etc. I also think even the current Tegra product is far superior than the old qualcomm and OMAP2 chips being used even in newer devices from HTC and others.
It is just that it is time to move on from ARM11, and move all the new high-end smartphones to newer ARM architectures. If nvidia stays with a dual-core architecture, I'm sure they will have a powerhouse dual-core Cortex-A9-based Tegra out in a year or so.
The GPU is what will make most the difference. Considering most of the cpu load comes from graphics rendering, if you can put that all onto a separate chip, then the cpu can process applications unhindered. It's like trying to play a video game on a intel i7 with an integrated graphics card, instead of running it on a core 2 duo with a dedicated graphics card. Sure it doesn't have all that processing power, but the cpu isn't going to be overloaded with graphics rendering.
Is that the slide II. I love that look.