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NVIDIA Tegra 4 Architecture Deep Dive, Plus Tegra 4i, Icera i500 & Phoenix Hands Onby Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 2/24/2013 3:00 PM EST
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tipoo - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkUnder 500 in Sunspider, about twice as fast as anything else ARM. But then again, it's a few months newer than that, and actually still not shipping. And as usual with Nvidia they're early to each party (first to dual core, first to quad core), but not always the best performing. We'll see if other Cortex A15 designs beat it.
I'd love to see four of those cores paired with SGXs upcoming 600/Rogue series. Reply
jeffkibuule - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkSunSpider is so software sensitive that a Tegra 3 @ 1.2 Ghz on Windows RT beats a Snapdraon S4 Pro @ 1.5Ghz on Nexus 4 using Chrome. It's a terrible benchmark because its so dependent on underlying kernel optimizations in the Android phone market. Reply
tipoo - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkTrue, other benchmarks are similarly impressive though. Reply
karasaj - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkPsh it has nothing on my desktop! 125ms on sunspider... Nvidia so behind.
Anyways, still looks impressive. I really want to see some Krait 600/800 benchmarks. Reply
tipoo - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkThe fact that they're getting well below an order of magnitude slower than desktops is impressive in itself too. Even with iPad 2 level performance I still was reluctant to do most of my web browsing on a tablet for the performance. Maybe with Tegra 4 and beyond hardware speed that will change. Reply
Mumrik - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkAs someone with heavily tabbed browsing habits, I don't think I'll ever make that jump (and I own a tablet). Reply
tipoo - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkAlso true, that's my other thing. I like to open a bunch of background tabs and have them ready as I go through each one. Right now, tablets don't do background loading, as far as I know, and if they did they wouldn't be powerful enough to keep the main tab smooth while doing it. Reply
Tarwin - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkTablets DO do background loading, as long as they're android. The only performance I've seen is from lack of RAM on my phone and lack of bandwidth on the phone and tablet but those things affect any computer as well. One observation to ne made, they do load in the background but things like audio and video playback will pause if you switch to another tab. Reply
von Krupp - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkEven Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 do background loading. I haven't used it, but I'd wager that RT does as well, if even the gimpy mobile OS can. Reply
tuxRoller - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkAs someone who had, until recently, over 40 tabs open on my chrome browser (Nexus 4), the critical problem has been memory. With enough memory, and good enough task management, these problems tend to go away.
Of course, maybe you are than 0.00001% who has hundreds or thousands of tabs open in which case I pity any computer you are likely to own. Reply
darkich - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkYou should know better than to compare different platforms on sunspider.
It's more software than hardware dependant benchmark.
Read the jefkibuule's post Reply
danielfranklin - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - linkWith my own testing ive managed to get my Nexus 10 at between 500-600ms on Sunspider. Clocked at roughly 2ghz. It depends more on the browser, the stock android browser is much faster at this than Chrome and doesnt come with the Nexus 10 or Nexus 4. Reply
ilihijan - Sunday, March 03, 2013 - linkI just got paid $6784 working on my laptop using these simple steps leaked on this web page. Make up to $85 per hour doing simple tasks that are so easy to do that you won't forgive yourself if you don't check it out! Weekly payments! Here is what I've been doing Epic2.c(om) Reply
GiantPandaMan - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkGiven the vastly different conclusions and what not, I think it would be interesting if Charlie and Anand had a roundtable discussion about the SoC space, both phone and tablet. Has Tegra had a noticeable lack of design wins? Has nVidia overpromised and underdelivered three times in a row? Or is Charlie exaggerating far too much?
I'm making no judgement myself, since I really know very little about how phone and tablet manufacturers view the various SoC's.
Have you guys reached out to manufacturers and gotten their takes at all? Reply
s44 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkWhat, Charlie pushing anti-Nvidia storylines? Who'd have imagined that. Reply
lmcd - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkI feel like T2 underperformed because the software on it underperformed (see DX2), as Honeycomb was a pretty terrible release.
Tegra 3 didn't do poorly at all. It performed phenomenally as a cheap chip (though the high-clocked ones on high-end phones made no sense). 28nm was a must-have for a high-end chip that generation.
Tegra 4 looks about where everyone expected it. No one should have been surprised with any of those units on the performance levels. Reply
lmcd - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkDX2 and Honeycomb not being the same subject of course.
But 2.3 was equally bad Reply
rahvin - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkA lot of what Charlie said is easily check-able. Tegra2 had a ton of design wins and almost no actual sales. Tegra3 has done phenomenally, but only in tablets and it's already been replaced in one or two. I think the most prophetic thing he said is the most obvious, unlike every previous generation they didn't announce a single design win for Tegra4. That to me speaks volumes.
We'll know in time if it's just the vendetta or if his sources are correct. I've never heard of a chip maker doing a reference design and personally I just don't see that having any effect or why they would even do it. The manufacturers like to differentiate and the reference design takes that away, which again speaks to lack of manufacturer interest. Charlie tends to over exaggerate things but IMO he's been fairly spot on. Even with the highest revenue in their history profit was down almost 25% (which I attribute to the change to paying for wafer instead of good chips).
Again, time will tell. Reply
Kidster3001 - Thursday, February 28, 2013 - linkFFRD is popular for companies that only produce the chips and not any phones themselves. Samsung has no need to do it, Apple either. Who's left? Qualcomm sells (almost) reference designs with their MDP, Intel's first two phones (Lava Xolo and Orange Santa Clara) were basically rebadged reference devices. Now NVidia's doing it. One advantage to having an FFRD is so that the customer can bring it to market faster and cheaper. OEM's like that and it also allows for chip manufacturers to get their stuff into the hands of smaller OEMs who don't have large R&D budgets.
All the Tegra chips have had higher power consumption than their peers from other manufacturers. It looks like Tegra4 is no exception. They work well in tablets where it is less important, but poor battery life is a really good reason for OEM's to not make phones based on your chips.
My personal opinion is that A15 (ARMs core) will never be a really good design for a phone. It has really high performance but the power envelope just isn't going to work. Those who design custom cores will come out ahead in the phone battle: Apple, Qualcomm, Intel and perhaps even NVidia if they move away from ARM IP with their Denver design. Reply
TheJian - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkCharlie has hated NV forever. He did the same crap at theINQ for years. At least he named his site accurately...ROFL. Actually I enjoy reading (used to) some of his stuff, but when he speaks about NV I'd say his site should have been named usuallynotaccurate.com
Now he's actually charging for semiaccurate articles...LOL
Seriously? If it was that important I'd rather pay for something like MPR. Charlie is usually good for a laugh and that's about it regarding NV.
Though I've written some stuff about this site's bias recently (my titan article posts and the 660ti article comments), I don't think anandtech and semiaccurate sit at the same table. Anandtech isn't making stuff up, they're just leaving out 3/4 of the story IMHO (regarding my comments on the 14games etc that should be in the game suite & the two that shouldn't). Charlie just throws darts at a board for a large portion of his articles. IF you keep his articles (I did for a long time) and go back over them he's only right about 50%. Either he's getting WMD like UK info (ala bush and iraq, though I think they just moved them to syria...LOL we gave them ages to move them) or he just makes it up himself ("my deep mole in x company said blah blah"). There's no proof until ages later when most forget what he even said, right or wrong. Note there is NO COMMENT section on the site now. They're all blocked :) Ubergizmo called his site "half accurate". My data of old articles used to say the same :) I expect more than flipping a coin results in reporting. He gets credit for things like breaking the news on the bapco fiasco, but I'd say Van Smith gets credit for exposing not only that Intel OWNED the land they had their building on (they paid rent to Intel), Intel OWNED their domain name, and even had a hand in WRITING the code as Intel software engineers were on hand next door. Van covered it all YEARS before Charlie. Look up Van smith and vanshardware, a lot of that crap and the biased intel reporting forced Van to leave and probably dropped the price of Toms site to 1/4 of it's value when tom dumped it. He was worth MORE than anandtech before that stuff. Not sure of the value today, I'm talking back then.
Biased reporting gets you killed if the right people keep pointing it out with DATA backing it. IF Tom's hadn't gone down that Intel love-in route he probably could have sold for much more. There's a reason Otellini said in 2006 that toms was his favorite tech site ;) Then in turn dumped the site as it's credibility tanked. Bapco was, and still is a sham. AMD/NV/VIA all left the consortium for a reason. I don't put much stock in anything from them (futuremark either). Tom's treatment of Van (even removed his bylines on stories) was downright disgusting. I stopped reading toms for about 5 years due to that crap in ~2001. He replaced every article the guy wrote with "THG staff". Total BS. Charlie does the same with NV hate as toms with Intel love. This crap costs credibility.
Anandtech is coming close to the same thing on NV gpu's; Ryan's AMD love anyway, I'll bang away until he stops :) Funny how they never attack the data I provide here. I link to them at toms forums too, eventually that will begin to hurt as people look at the evidence and draw their own conclusions about his articles and in turn this site's credibility. If he continues on the next reviews (700's and 8000's) I'll get on a lot more forums linking the comments after the data dismantling (polite critique of course Ryan :)).
The "Jian" is a double edged sword Ryan ;) Thin, light and very maneuverable...LOL
In Chinese folklore, it is known as "The Gentleman of Weapons"
I'm not hostile Ryan ;) Wikipedia says so. :)
Google this: thejian anandtech
Data piles up don't it? I save all my posts (before posting) anyway, but google does too. Reply
Death666Angel - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - linkGet a life. Reply
StormyParis - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkI'd go with Anand, anytime. Charlie is a raving bitch. Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkExcept that this raving bitch has accurately predicted the future course of most companies months before anybody. Reply
Avalon - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkIf by accurate you mean he made many predictions for every company and when one of the predictions came true everyone forgot about all the wrong ones. He guesses. Reply
Kiste - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkConfirmation bias ahoy! Reply
AmdInside - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkAre you kidding me? Even congress lies less than Charlie does. Reply
jjj - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkI wouldn't expect a huge downclock for phones , they do need to limit heat, not going with POP for the RAM helps ,some actual cooling (air gap or metal) could also be used so they will most likely allow 1-2 cores to go pretty high and maybe all 4 for short periods of time (so the usual tricks to get more out of it). Reply
R3MF - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkre tegra 4 gpu architecture.
how did you get through this many words without mentioning OpenCL?
lack of ES 3.0 is only half the problem. Reply
cmikeh2 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkHe does reference it when discussing the Chimera ISP:
"At the same time, the elephant in the room is OpenCL (and its current absence on Tegra 4) and what direction the industry will take that to leverage GPU compute for some computational photography processing." Reply
guidryp - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkThe Icera acquisition was a brilliant one. This gives NVidia the complete mobile package. It will be very interesting to see how this works out in practice. NVidia is a fierce competitor, Qualcomm should be worried. Reply
klmccaughey - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkDefinitely. All good for us too! :) Reply
twotwotwo - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link> In the PC industry we learned that there's no real downside to quad-core as long as you can power gate individual cores, and turbo up to higher frequencies when fewer than four cores are active, there's no real tradeoff other than cost.
I'm not completely sure, because there are always other possible uses for die area.
You could do the big/little thing with A7 'companion' cores, like Samsung. You could use even more area for GPU, like Apple. Wiki suggests you could double the L2 cache to 4MB (though more cache would always be eating power, even with only one core turned on).
guidryp - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link"there are always other possible uses for die area"
Yes, in the case of Tegra 3, they could certainly have used extra GPU power more than 4 CPU cores. But they seem to have remedied that this time. Reply
twotwotwo - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkDef possible, and what they disclosed in this presentation would suggest they've handled it.
All that's working against them, GPU-wise, is that user expectations increased since last gen, and Mali/PowerVR improved. So now T4i needs to drive 1080p phone screens and T4 needs to drive screens like the Nexus 10's, if they want to be the most bleeding-edge, anyway.
But they did talk about large integer-factor improvements in the GPU, so maybe they haven't merely built the GPU that would've been nice to have last gen, but moved up enough to be great this gen. Reply
sosadsohappy - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkSamsung has just said it is doing A15-A7 pairing. Saying out the future plans just to keep the crowd excited is not new. That does not rule out the possibility of Qualcomm or Nvidia going for similar big.LITTLE designs. They are for the next-gen I would think. (Tell me if I am wrong but have anyone sampled big.LITTLE based SoC yet?)
And talking about die area, what is impressive about Nvidia is how their chips are always smaller. Quad-core A15 is about 80mm^2 while you can check for the sizes of Qualcomm's or Apple's chips! FWIW Apple's are not in 28nm but still they don't scale equally.
I am excited to see the 60mm^2 (right?) chip (Tegra4i). If it is what they claim, it should have great battery life for a smartphone. Reply
s44 - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link4+1 is Nvidia's version of big.LITTLE. The 1 low-power A15 is about the same die space as the 4 A7s on the next Exynos... Reply
sosadsohappy - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkYes. The only difference is that the big.LITTLE will sport different architectures on the big and LITTLE while NV's 4+1 will have the same arch (A15 for both).
And personally I think 4+1 is better as of now until we have Atlas and Apollo combination of big.LITTLE because (correct me if I'm wrong) A7 does not have as much of memory parallelism, it is to weak as well...
No matter what, it has been impressive that Nvidia chips have significantly lower die size than the competition's dual-core chips! Reply
Krysto - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkToo weak? For what? Receiving notifications? We'll see if Tegra 4 is more energy efficient than Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa later this year. Then we might get a better idea whether Nvidia or ARM's implementation is better.
And I agree. Nvidia managed to have the same graphics performance + a quad core Cortex A15 CPU in 80mm2 vs Apple with a dual core CPU and same graphics performance in 120 mm2. That's pretty impressive, even if it arrives half a year late.
I still wish Nvidia would actually want to compete at the high-end though, with a 120mm2 chip, and beat Apple. It annoys me that they are still trying to build only "good enough for most people" chips. They should be trying to be the king of mobile graphics. They are freaking Nvidia, and they can't even beat a mobile GPU maker? Come on, Nvidia. Reply
name99 - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link> In the PC industry we learned that there's no real downside to quad-core as long as you can power gate individual cores, and turbo up to higher frequencies when fewer than four cores are active, there's no real tradeoff other than cost.
Sony Ericsson recently released a paper claiming this was not true, even apart from the die area issues. In particular they claimed that with current technology, coupling capacitance, ground plane issues, communication (with the L2, including coherence) and suchlike, quad-core imposed something like a 25% reduction in peak MHz possible for two cores, compared to those same two cores isolated rather than on a quad-core die.
Now obviously any company publication is talking up its book, but I imagine they're not going to make a statement that is blatantly false in a technical publication, implying there is some truth to what they say. Reply
Wilco1 - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - linkGiven Tegra 4i achieves 2.3GHz in a quad core with shared L2, way more than Krait which uses per-CPU L2, I think the claim that a shared L2 is clock limiting seems more marketing than substance. Reply
xsacha - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - linkTegra4i uses Cortex-A9. Krait is similar to Cortex-A15. The Krait obviously uses way more power and gives way more performance clock-for-clock. So you are comparing apples and oranges here. The 1.9GHz Krait quad-core is roughly equivalent to 2.5GHz+ in a Tegra 4i. Reply
It would be wise to design for the technology we have today, not the dream of technology we may one day have. As I have stated elsewhere, there is ample evidence that on the desktop, even today, multiple threads running on more than two cores at once is very rare. (More precisely
- many apps are multithreaded, but those threads tend to be mostly async IO type threads, mostly waiting
- there is a mild win to having three cores available, but it's not much advantage over two cores
- the situation has improved a little over ten years ago (when the first SMT P4s first started appearing) and when there was little advantage to two cores over one. But most of the improvement is the result of OS vendors moving as much stuff as possible of what they do (GUI, IO, etc) onto the second core.)
The only real code that utilizes multiple cores is video-encoding. In particular both games and photo processing do not use nearly as much multi-core as people imagine.
The situation for mobile is the same, only a little worse because there is less of simultaneous heavyweight apps running.
Given these facts, and the way code is actually structured today, 4 cores makes very little sense.
SMT makes sense, mainly in that its power and area footprint is very low, so it's a win on those occasions when the OS can make use of it. Beyond that, if you have excess transistors available, beefed up vectors (wider registers, and wider units) probably makes more sense. You'll notice that these recommendations parallel what Intel has done over the past few years --- they are not idiots, and desktop code is very similar to mobile code.
As for parallel web browsing, people have been publishing about it for years now; but the real world results remain unimpressive. It remains an unfortunate fact that the things that have been converted to parallel don't seem to be, for most sites, the things that are actually gating performance. A similar problem exists with PDF display (still not as snappy as I would like on an iPad3) --- the simple and obvious things you can imagine for parallelizing the rendering aren't the things that are usually the problem.
In both cases, the ideal situation would be to restart with totally redesigned file formats that are non-serial in nature; but that seems to be a "boil-the-ocean" strategy that no-one wants to commit to yet. (Though it would be nice if Apple and Adobe could get together to redefine a PDF2.0 file format that was explicitly parallel, and that seems rather easier than fixing the web.) Reply
Krysto - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkIt seems Nvidia really pulled off making Tegra 4's GPU 6x faster than Tegra 3, and with 5 Cortex A15 cores and 6x more GPU cores, all in the same size. Pretty impressive. But still quite disappointing for lack of OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL support. I really hope they plan on supporting them in Tegra 5 along with the new 64 CPU and Maxwell-based GPU cores. Reply
Mike1111 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkI would really like to see an analysis/comparison of companion core (Nvidia) vs. big.LITTLE (Samsung). Reply
lmcd - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkBIG.little (fixed it for ARM) isn't even in reference device stage yet is it? Reply
Krysto - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkNo need to fix it. The "opposite" style naming is intentional. It's ironic. Get it? Reply
phoenix_rizzen - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkExynos 5 Octa, which is A15/A7 big.LITTLE, has been demoed. Tegra 4, which is A15 plus a companion core, has been demoed.
Neither are commercially available, neither are in shipping products, neither are available to consumers.
IOW, the Cortex-A15 variations for bit.LITTLE have passed the reference stage, and are in the "find companies to use them to build devices" stage. They'll be in consumers' grubby little hands before Christmas 2013. Reply
tviceman - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - linkGPU performance ended up better than I thought it would after the subdued announcement and leaked early prototype benchmarks. Good to see. Reply
wongwarren - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkI wonder which is faster. This or the Snapdragon 600. Reply
varad - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkSnapdragon 600:
Tegra 4:
So if the metric is simply raw performance [since you asked "faster"], looks like the Tegra 4 will win easily against the Snapdragon 600.
A better/fair comparison would be when we have performance numbers for Snapdragon 600 in a tablet or Tegra 4 in a phone. Reply
Krysto - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkS600 is just a slightly overclocked S4 Pro with the same GPU.
The real competitor of Tegra 4 will be S800. We'll see if it wins in CPU performance (it might not), and I think there's a high chance it will lose in GPU performance, as Adreno 330 is only 50% faster than Adreno 320 I think, and Tegra 4 is about twice as fast.
Qualcomm has always had slower graphics performance than Nvidia actually. The only "gap" they found in the market was last fall with the Adreno 320, when Nvidia didn't have anything good to show. But Tegra 3 beat S4 with its Adreno 225. Reply
watersb - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkI'm amazed at the depth of this NVIDIA data-dump. Brilliant work.
Anand's observation re: die size, cost strategy, position in the market and how this buys them time to consolidate... Wow.
Clearly, Nvidia is in this game for the long haul. Reply
djgandy - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkSo OpenGL ES 3.0 doesn't matter, but quad core A15 does? Why do people suck up to Nvidia and their marketing BS so much?
T4i still single channel memory? What a joke configuration. Reply
djgandy - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkAlso a 9 page article about a mobile SoC without a single reference to the word "battery". Reply
varad - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkRead the article before you write such comments. The very first page is "Introduction & Power" where they do mention some numbers and their thoughts. Reply
djgandy - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkYeah its all smoke and mirrors under lab test conditions. Where is the real battery life? Is this not for battery powered devices? Reply
Krysto - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkPersonally, I think all 2013 GPU's should have support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL. I was stunned to find out Tegra 4 was not going to support it as they haven't even switched to a unified shader architecture.
That being said, Anand is probably right that it was the right move for Nvidia, and they are just going to wait for the Maxwell architecture to streamline the same custom ARMv8 CPU from Tegra 5 to Project Denver across product line-ups, and also the same Maxwell GPU cores.
If that's indeed their plan, then switching Tegra 4 to Kepler this year, only to switch again to Maxwell next year wouldn't have made any sense. GPU architectures barely change even every 2-3 years, let alone 1 year. It wouldn't have been cost effective for them.
I do hope they aren't going to delay the transition again with Tegra 5 though, and I also do hope they follow Qualcomm's strategy with S4 last year of switching IMEMDIATELY to the 20nm process, instead of continuing on 28nm with Tegra 5, like they did with Tegra 3 on 40nm. But I fear Nvidia will repeat the same mistake.
If they put Tegra 5 on 20nm, and make it 120mm2 in size, with Maxwell GPU core, I don't think even Apple's A8X will stand against it next year in terms of GPU performance (and of course it will get beaten easily in CPU performance, just like this year). Reply
djgandy - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkTegra is smaller because it lacks features and also memory bandwidth. The comparison is not really fair to assume you can just throw more shaders at the problem. You'll need wider memory bus for a start. You'll need more TMU's and in the future it's probably smart to have a dedicate ROP unit. Then also are you seriously going to just stick with FP20 and not support ES 3.0 and OpenCL? OEMs see OpenCL as a de facto feature these days, not because it is widely used but because it opens up future possibilities. Nvidia has simply designed an SoC for gaming here.
Your post focuses on performance, but these are battery powered devices. The primary design goal is efficiency, and it would appear that is why apple went swift and not A15. A15 is just too damn power hungry, even for a tablet. Reply
metafor - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkIf the silicon division of Apple were its own business, they'd be in the red. Very few silicon providers can afford to make 120mm^2 chips and still make a profit; let alone one with as little bargaining clout in the mobile space as nVidia.
Numbers are great but at the end of the day, making money is what matters. Reply
milli - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linknVidia is trying hard but Tegra still isn't making them any money ... Reply
PingviN - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkTegra made an operating loss of $150 million for fiscal year 2012, despite getting into both the Nexus 7 (the refresh coming this year has been lost to Qualcomm) and the Surface RT. Sales prognosis cut almost in half for the fiscal year 2013. To date, Nvidia hasn't had any profit coming out of Tegra and now it's in limbo mode until Tegra 4 is released because Tegra 3 gets smashed by it's competition.
It's been a pretty crappy year for Tegra. Reply
guilmon14 - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkI don't know anything about this company "tegra", but have you heard about Nvidia? I heard they're doing great!
According to this Nvidia is up in income, revenue, and equity.
If you wanted to check the easy way just look at nvidia's wikipedia page, gives you all the nice money numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia Reply
trajan2448 - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link5 years down the road phones will be cooking our dinner. It's amazing how fast the tech is advancing now. Reply
Scannall - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkIf they don't hustle right along, SOC's with the PowerVR 6 series (Rogue) will beat them to market. And considering their GPU just barely squeaks by the iPad as it is, it will be behind early on. Reply
Khato - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkWas it specifically stated that the Tegra 4 SPECint/W figure was running on the high speed cores? As is mentioned later on the page, a SPECint2000 of 520 is within reach of the power optimized companion core, so the only reason I'd expect NVIDIA to not use the companion core for this data is if they explicitly stated that it wasn't.
Part of the cause for my suspicion is that the Power vs DMIPS chart that Samsung recently provided for the Exynos 5 Octa shows 8k DMIPS at 1 watt... and from the press coverage back in 2009 for the A9 hard macros there's both the 10k DMIPS at 1.9 watts and 2GHz with the speed speed optimized and 4k DMIPS at 250 mW and 800 MHz for the power optimized. Which equate to 5.26 DMIPS/mW and 8 DMIPS/mW, respectively. Now the 2GHz data point should be even worse off than Tegra 3 and yet it only shows the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa as being 52% more efficient.
Going into estimating rather than published numbers, if we up the efficiency of Tegra 3 a bit compared to that 2GHz figure then it's likely going to be closer to A15 being 30% more efficient... which you then add the known ~40% efficiency bump going from a performance to power implementation and you get the kind of drastic increase NVIDIA is touting. Reply
Wilco1 - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkIt doesn't matter whether they used the 5th core or one of the fast ones. By definition the cross over point is where the 5th core uses as much power as a fast core. Since that is ~800MHz, the power efficiency is the same. The 5th core can likely clock to well over 1GHz, but then it uses more power than a fast core.
You are basically right that some of the 73% MIPS/W improvement comes from the 40-28nm process change. However the combined improvement of process and micro architecture means that you can use the low power core far more often. The 5th core in Tegra 4 is effectively more than 3 times as fast than the one in Tegra 3. So that means lots of tasks which needed 1-2 fast Tegra 3 cores can now run on the 5th Tegra 4 core. That means the power efficiency will actually improve by what NVidia suggests. Reply
Khato - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkMind sharing the source for that? The wording in this article implies differently - "That 825MHz mark ends up being an important number, because that's where the fifth companion Cortex A15 tops out at." Given 1.9GHz for the performance-optimized cores, something around 800 MHz sounds about right for the max frequency of a power-optimized version.
Anyway, there's no question that Tegra 4 will be quite a bit more power efficient simply by virtue of being able able to run more workloads exclusively on the companion core. As said before, in exchange for a much lower cap on maximum frequency a power optimized synthesis gives at least a 40% bump in efficiency... and now that power optimized core will still deliver respectable performance. Reply
Wilco1 - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkRead http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/tegra_white_pape... it explains the difference between leakage and active power on low power and high performance transistors. It explicitly says the 5th core in Tegra is capped at 500MHz as that is where it is as power efficient as a fast core. The graphs and the word capped suggest the 5th core can go faster but there is no point.
Note that Tegra 3 uses a different process with low power transistors for the 5th core rather than a low power synthesis (not that they couldn't have done that too, but it is never mentioned and the 5th core looks pretty much the same in the die plots). I presume Tegra 4 does the same on the 28nm process. Reply
Khato - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkOkay, so your commentary is based on the Tegra 3 which is using an entirely different approach to power savings for the companion core. Note that all of the data I was referencing for the difference in efficiency between ARM's two A9 hard macros was on the same process and hence is more applicable to the case of Tegra 4. As you correctly state, Tegra 3 gains its power efficiency for the companion core by using the LP process rather than a low power synthesis, likely due to it being a simpler and faster route to the desired end result and equally effective for their design goals.
Tegra 4 isn't playing process games for the companion core. How do you gain efficiency on the same process? You loosen timings to allow for the usage of smaller transistors, less flop stages, so on so forth. The end result being that you sacrifice maximum switching speed to reduce both leakage and dynamic power. From all the information that NVIDIA has made available it's a completely different implementation from Tegra 3. Reply
Wilco1 - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkTegra 4 does exactly the same as Tegra 3. According to NVidia's white paper on Tegra 4 (http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/116757/NVIDIA_Quad_a... it also uses low power transistors for the 5th core. Again if you look at the die photos of Tegra 4 all 5 cores are identical just like Tegra 3. So that seems to exclude a different synthesis.
The way NVidia get a low power core is by using low power transistors. TSMC 28nm process supports several different transistor libraries, from high performance high leakage to low performance low leakage. Based on the information we have all they have done is swap the transistor libraries. Reply
TheJian - Monday, February 25, 2013 - linkhttp://www.anandtech.com/show/6472/ipad-4-late-201...
ipad4 scored 47 vs. 57 for T4 in egypt hd offscreen 1080p. I'd say it's more than competitive with ipad4. T4 scores 2.5x iphone5 in geekbench (4148 vs. 1640). So it's looking like it trumps A6 handily.
T4 should beat 600 in Antutu and browsermark. IF S800 is just an upclocked cpu and adreno 330 this is going to be a tight race in browsermark and a total killing for NV in antutu. 400mhz won't make up the 22678 for HTC ONE vs. T4's 36489. It will fall far short in antutu unless the gpu means a lot more than I think in that benchmark. I don't think S600 will beat T4 in anything. HTC ONE only uses 1.7ghz the spec sheet at QCOM says it can go up to 1.9ghz but that won't help from the beating it took according to pcmag. They said this:
"The first hint we've seen of Qualcomm's new generation comes in some benchmarks done on the HTC One, which uses Qualcomm's new 1.7-GHz Snapdragon 600 chipset - not the 800, but the next notch down. The Tegra 4 still destroys it."
Iphone5 got destroyed too. Geekbench on T4=4148 vs. iphone5=1640. OUCH.
Note samsung/qualcomm haven't let PC mag run their own benchmarks on Octa or S800. Nvidia is showing now signs of fear here. Does anyone have data on the cpu in Snapdragon800? Is the 400cpu in it just a 300cpu clocked up 400mhz because of the process or is it actually a different core? It kind of looks like this is just 400mhz more on the cpu with an adreno330 on top instead of 320 of S600.
"The Krait 300 provides new microarchitecture improvements that increase per-clock performance by 10–15% while pushing CPU speed from 1.5GHz to 1.7GHz. The Krait 400 extends the new microarchitecture to 2.3GHz by switching to TSMC's high-k metal gate (HKMG) process."
Anyone have anything showing the cpu is MORE than just 400mhz more on a new process? This sounds like no change in the chip itself. That article was Jan23 and Gwennap is pretty knowledgeable. Admittedly I didn't do a lot of digging yet (can't find much on 800 cpu specs, did most of my homework on S600 since it comes first).
We need some Rogue 6 data now too :) Lots of post on the G6100 in the last 18hrs...Still reading it all... ROFL (MWC is causing me to do a lot of reading today...). About 1/2 way through and most of it seems to just brag about opengl es3.0 and DX11.1 (not seeing much about perf). I'm guessing because NV doesn't have it on T4 :) It's not used yet, so I don't care but that's how I'd attack T4 in the news ;) Try running something from DX11.1 on a soc and I think we'll see a slide show (think crysis3 on a soc...LOL). I'd almost say the same for all of es3.0 being on. NV was wise to save die space here and do a simpler chip that can undercut prices of others. They're working on DX9_3 features in WinRT (hopefully MS will allow it). OpenGL ES3.0 & DX11.1 will be more important next xmas. Game devs won't be aiming at $600 phones for their games this xmas, they'll aim at mass market for the most part just like on a pc (where they aim at consoles DX9, then we get ports...LOL). It's a rare game that's aimed at GXT680/7970ghz and up. Crysis3? Most devs shoot far lower.
No perf bragging just features...Odd while everyone else brags vs. their own old versions or other chips.
Qcom CMO goes all out:
"Nvidia just launched their Tegra 4, not sure when those will be in the market on a commercial basis, but we believe our Snapdragon 600 outperforms Nvidia's Tegra 4. And we believe our Snapdragon 800 completely outstrips it and puts a new benchmark in place.
So, we clean Tegra 4′s clock. There's nothing in Tegra 4 that we looked at and that looks interesting. Tegra 4 frankly, looks a lot like what we already have in S4 Pro..."
OOPS...I guess he needs to check the perf of tegra4 again. PCmag shows he's 600 chip got "DESTROYED" and all other competition "crushed". Why is Imagination not bragging about perf of G6100? Is it all about feature/api's without much more power? Note that page from phonearena is having issues (their server is) as I had to get it out of google cache just now from earlier. He's a marketing guy from Intel so you know, a "blue crystals" kind of guy :) The CTO would be bragging about perf I think if he had it. Anand C is fluff marketing guy from Intel (but he has a masters in engineering, he's just marketing it appears now and NOT throwing around data just "i believe" comments). One last note, Exynos octa got kicked out of Galaxy S4 because it overheated the phone according to the same site. So Octa is tablet only I guess? Galaxy S4 is a superphone and octa didn't work in it if what they said is true (rumored 1.9ghz rather than 1.7ghz HTC ONE version). Reply
fteoath64 - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link@TheJian: "ipad4 scored 47 vs. 57 for T4 in egypt hd offscreen 1080p. I'd say it's more than competitive with ipad4. T4 scores 2.5x iphone5 in geekbench (4148 vs. 1640). So it's looking like it trumps A6 handily."
Good reference!. This shows T4 doing what it ought to in the tablet space as Apple's CPU release cycle tends to be 12 to 18 months, giving Nvidia lots of breathing room. Also besides, since Qualcomm launched all their new ranges, the next cycle is going to be a while. However, Qualcomm has so many design wins on their Snapdragons, it leaves little room for Nvidia and others to play. Is this why TI went out of this market ?. So could Amazon be candidate for T4i on their next tablet update ?.
PS: The issue with Apple putting quad PVR544 into iPad was to ensure the performance overall with retina is up to par with the non-retina version. Especially the Mini which is among the fastest tablet out there considering it needs to push less than a million pixels yet delivering a good 10 hours of use. Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - linkHey AnandTech, you never told us what is the "Project Thor" , that JHH let slip at CES.. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 28, 2013 - linkThis is how it goes for nVidia from, well we know whom at this point, meaning, it appears everyone here.
" I have to give NVIDIA credit, back when it introduced Tegra 3 I assumed its 4+1 architecture was surely a gimmick and to be very short lived. I remember asking NVIDIA's Phil Carmack point blank at MWC 2012 whether or not NVIDIA would standardize on four cores for future SoCs. While I expected a typical PR response, Phil surprised me with an astounding yes. NVIDIA was committed to quad-core designs going forward. I still didn't believe it, but here we are in 2013 with NVIDIA's high-end and mainstream roadmaps both exclusively featuring quad-core SoCs. NVIDIA remained true to its word, and the more I think about it, the more the approach makes sense."
paraphrased: " They're lying to me, they lie, lie ,lie ,lie ,lie. (pass a year or two or three) Oh my it wasn't a lie. "
Rinse and repeat often and in overlapping fashion.
Love this place, and no one learns.
Here's a clue: It's AMD that has been lying it's yapper off to you for years on end. Reply
Origin64 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkWow. 120mbps LTE? I get a fifth of that through a cable at home. Reply


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Related stories: Chino Hills officials caution residents | Dozens turn out to discuss Chino Hills maternity hotel | Alleged maternity hotel operation prompts criminal complaint against homeowner | Chino Hills home small part of birth tourism industry | 70 protest alleged 'maternal hotel' in Chino Hills | Chino Hills residents raise concerns about possibly of maternity hotel operation
CHINO HILLS - City officials have been unable to confirm if another Chinese maternity hotel is operating in the city out of a mansion in the Grand Pointe community.
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Members from the grassroots group will attend tonight's council meeting at 7 at the City Council Chambers, 14000 City Center Drive.
Reach Canan via email, call her at 909-987-6397 ext. 425, or find her on Twitter @ChinoValleyNow.


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Alienware M17x R4 Notebook Review: Ivy Bridge and the GeForce GTX 680Mby Dustin Sklavos on 9/21/2012 12:01 AM EST
61 Comments
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5150Joker - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkYou mentioned that ASUS improved their gaming line with respect to performance and cooling. Which of Asus's notebooks has a 680M GPU? Oh that's right, none of them do! The cooling in the M17x-R4 and it's bigger brother M18x-R2 are among the best in the industry (if not the best). Clevo (and its respective clones) are close but their newest P and HM models aren't quite as good. Reply
Wolfpup - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkYeah, I'm confused by that...you can't compare something with a GTX 660 to something cooling a GTX 680!
I mean maybe it's worse when they both have 660s, but...unless you're actually comparing them like that, it's not valid.
The price comments are strange too.
I just configured an M17x-R4 with a better CPU and a GTX 680 versus what the Asus G75 ships with, and it was only a few hundred more. That by comparison actually makes the R4 seem like the better deal.
MOST disappointed though in this Optimus stuff! Inexplicably Anandtech keeps referring to it as though it's a good thing, when of course it's horrible. Geez, IN THIS REVIEW it talks about a big game not working right...and STILL acts like Optimus is a positive?
The ONLY reason I don't own an R3 is because Asus' G74 DIDN'T use Optimus. Apparently the G75 does...which is a huge setback.
We'd JUST finally gotten to the point where notebooks were getting real driver support...something Anandtech long championed...and now that work is all being destroyed by Optimus and Enduro. I NEVER see people in real life wanting those, and yet Anandtech continues to ignore the problems and, and refuses to slam notebooks for including it? Where just a couple years ago they stood up against the ridiculous driver support situation? Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkAnd again, we have Wolfpup railing on Optimus. Tell me what specifically doesn't work with Optimus? Don't tell me Total War: Shogun 2 because it works on the older driver set fine, which you can revert to if you happen to play that particular game at max settings. That's a driver bug and it will get fixed -- and unlike Enduro (up to this point) you get regular driver updates for Optimus laptops. Every single Optimus (and non-Optimus) NVIDIA GPU gets a driver update at the same time as the destops. The only exception is brand-new laptops where a new driver comes out within a couple weeks of the laptop launch; you might have to wait an extra month or two for the next Verde driver release before it gets support.
Personally, every person I know who plays games on a laptop and has used Optimus likes the feature. I don't know you, but you're in a very small minority I think. Even your last comment (in the AMD article) had someone specifically call you out and say "I bought a laptop specifically because it had Optimus." My guess: you actually don't realize that all NVIDIA Optimus laptops get driver updates the same time as other discrete-only GPUs. Which would show how much your opinion is worth, as it's based in a misunderstanding of reality. Reply
Wolfpup - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkSee, I don't understand where this discrepancy is coming from. ALL I see on message boards are non-stop Optimus problems. Blue screens. Games crashing, games refusing to use the dedicated GPU, stutter.
As near as I can tell it's a very, very small minority who LIKE Optimus-I literally only see positive things about it in some reviews like this-my assumption has been the hardware hasn't really been "lived with" with these positive comments about it-maybe I'm wrong though? But what's causing so many people to have problems with it?
I literally see people dealing with BIOS mods to get rid of switchable graphics-that appears to be common among people sophisticated enough to be caring about GPUs in the first place. As in some notebooks have no connection between the GPU and the display, but some do, and with modded BIOS can use it...NOT something I want to do, but there are active threads about multiple systems where that's just considered "normal" if you're going to consider a particular system. (I think the M14x physically CAN'T use the GPU without Optimus, but some HP models and I think the higher end Alienware models apperently can).
And yes, I know Nvidia supports this with driver updates/profile updates, etc. I never said they didn't. That doesn't change the problem-this at best hurts performance and causes issues. Outside the world of reviews, people "in the know" (which granted is probably 1% of people buying systems...but probably higher than that for people buying EXPENSIVE systems) avoid it.
I'm honestly not sure where the discrepancy is coming from, as really, Anandtech for me has always been the gold standard for doing honest, through reviews, avoiding/disparaging synthetic benchmarks and the like, but try finding anyone on say notebook reviews that HASN'T had a problem with Optimus on an M17x.
I guess I feel like this must be coming from just not living with the systems that are being reviewed, or something...maybe not using a broad enough swath of games on them. I'm not accusing you guys of lying, I really do trust you...but there really is some widespread problem here or I couldn't be seeing thousands of posts about fixing problems with it all the time. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkASUS now supports GTX 670M in the G75, and while it's not at the same performance level as the GTX 680M, it's not that far off in terms of power draw. What I want to see is ASUS with a GK106 based notebook, and we'll likely see that soon enough. I just don't know why NVIDIA used up the GTX 670M and 675M with rebadges, as now there's no spot for the GK106 to slot. GTX 670M SE? Guess we'll find out some time in the next couple of months.
What I really don't get is why ASUS has never made the effort to get the top-tier GPUs into their G5x/G7x of late. Ever since the 5870, all of their notebooks have used third tier mobile GPUs (meaning, three steps down from the fastest cards), and yet their cooling appears to work very well. All they need is a bigger power brick and a slight ramp in fan speed and they should be set. My guess is that there just aren't that many high-end gaming notebooks being sold, so ASUS would rather target the $1400 market instead of the $2000+ range.
And yes, I know the top-end G75VW-NS72 costs over $2000. It also comes with 16GB RAM, 3720QM, Blu-ray, and a 750GB HDD with a 256GB SSD -- and a 3GB GTX 670M. I wouldn't necessarily go out and buy one, since you can get the same result by purchasing the G75VW-NS71 and upgrading the RAM ($45), HDD ($95), SSD ($195) and Blu-ray combo ($85). So $1400 plus $420 gives you the equivalent of the $2100 NS72. :-\ Or you could get 95% of the way there by just buying an SSD for $195 and sticking with 12GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and no Blu-ray support. Reply
Wolfpup - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkYeah, I'm starting to get disappointed that they're not offering better options. Even the GTX 675MX sounds like it would be a pretty great choice (or heck, the 675M).
I've been VERY impressed by the cooling in my G74 (yes, purchased because it DOESN'T have Optimus)...I've literally had it Folding on both the GPU and GPU 24/7 since January, and...zero issues. It appears to be running identically today as it did 10 months ago. The entire time the CPU has even maintained a turbo boost (or whatever it's called) from 2 to 2.5GHz, the temps are fine, etc.
Seems like a LITTLE bit better GPU would fit in these? Reply
headbox - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkDear Alienware, please fire your marketing department and hire me. I'm sure I can come up with something consumers will remember, unlike "M17x R4" It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Take 10 people and tell them all about the new "M17x R4" and a day later ask them to tell you the name of the product. They won't remember. A certain highly profitable computer company realized this years ago. Reply
redchar - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI think it's fine compared to what many other companies do.
M designates mobile, 17 screen size, and r4 for the 4th revision. It's easy to identify and short. On the other hand companies like asus and hp have bizarre naming. Reply
StevoLincolnite - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThey could have just called it the Alienware 4 or something.
There is a marked difference to what an enthusiast will remember about computers and what the average joe will remember, shorter model names are good in that regard. Reply
DanNeely - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkSince they've got multiple laptop sizes it'd end up having to be something like the "17 inch Alienware 4"
However I'm not optimistic about Joe Fragfest's ability to remember anything more than "Alienware" and possibly "17 inches"; and don't see any reason to compromise the model number when only geeks/tech support are going to use it anyway. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI can't imagine many non-enthusiasts buying Alienware laptops. Maybe that's just me, though? Reply
JKflipflop98 - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkActually, only non-enthusiasts buy anything from alienware. Those of us who know what we're doing can get the same hardware for less somewhere else. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkDesktops? Yes. Notebooks and laptops? Only if you're willing to go with one of the Clevo or MSI offerings, which both have a large number of issues. Alienware's designs definitely aren't perfect, but I can guarantee you that the M17x R4 is better than the Clevo P170EM in so many ways that it's not even close. The only thing going for Clevo is pricing, but to save $300 on a $2500 notebook you have to get an inferior keyboard, touchpad, firmware (power management), and chassis. Reply
Notmyusualid - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkNot true - some of us simply can't lug desktop & screen across the world, and are at the mercy of what laptop makers offer.
My M18X R2 is head and shoulders above my last three Clevo's, in terms of construction, performance, and audio [oh, but the glossy screen!].
Without it, I'd never game, as I couldn't be carrying around both Xbox / controllers / PSU / games, and a laptop.
In addition, our in-house software is very heavy on CPU / memory, crashes frequently (necessitating reboots), and i7 Extreme, twin SSDs in RAID0, & 16GB of memory make a nice combination for getting things done, which is a BIG part of the draw for me on a purchase such as this.
If you know where I can get this performance, in a mobile package, for less, please enlighten me. Do try to remember it must get pass the lady at the 'check in desk', and a desktop & monitor won't cut it.
As for the name, suits me fine, but as a biker, I'm used to number/letter-names.
Have a nice day. Reply
cheechms - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - linkWrong. I am in the industry and have built all my laptops up to this point. Yes, Alienware is expensive, heavy, and usually needs a cooling pad. I bought m17x r4 because of the form factor and packaging. All of the other gaming laptops are boring! Samsung's series 7 gamer is a boring piece of Charcoal color. Asus isn't any better. It's like buying a car. Am I gonna buy a Jeep Liberty or a Dodge Nitro when given the choice. I go for looks and packaging. Alienware's aesthetic is slick and sexy. In essence I'd say Alienware's marketing works just fine. Reply
Wolfpup - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI think it's fine too.
M17x is the generic name, and as redchar mentions, the M even stands for mobile.
Really the 'x' is the only part of the name that doesn't seem to mean anything. Personally I think this is one of the absolute best computer names on earth since it actually means something and isn't 308ch792y8-du219 like most computer models are lol Reply
bennyg - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkClevo should fire their marketing department... why is there no P170 based system on your benchmark comparison... Only two others with 580Ms as comparison and the one in the MSI barebones chassis (with the 675M) throttles like a b**ch.
Wheres the other models with 680M or 7970M. Clevo's competing products offer better price/performance and the cooling is up to scratch (I have P150HM/2760QM/GTX580M)
Similar hardware for a good discount, they have their issues (keyboard...) but it is just a glaring omission for this review not to consider ACTUAL competing products from the same class, either Clevo's for not supplying them (my suspicion) or AT for not putting them on. Even last gen would be worthy comparison, but for the only Clevo on this table to be an 11 inch with a mid range GPU is nuts... Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkAll in good time. I've got two P170EM models (HD 7970M and GTX 680M) and will post the 7970M review shortly. The delays for that review all stem from Enduro, incidentally. Reply
PubFiction - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThe alienware just costs way too much money. I wanted one but I could not justify the huge price increase. Reply
Wolfpup - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkPrince increase? These are if anything cheaper than ever. They actually make the Asus G75 look overpriced, I think. Reply
PubFiction - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI used a new clevo keyboard and it was horrible compared to the alienware. I cannot imagine how bad it was before. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkIt looks better in images... Dustin hasn't actually used it in person I don't think, and I can attest that the new keyboards actually feel worse than the old ones (and continue to have wonky layout issues). They fixed the number keypad but screwed up the Windows key, took out the context key, and put two backslash keys on the keyboard. I understand Clevo targets an international community, but they should just have a few separate hardware layouts for different regions rather than reusing the same layout and relabeling keys. Reply
jbordon - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThis might not be the place, but since it's a review of a gaming laptop, I'm wondering what's up with Razer Blade r2 review?
Need more looks versus power debates! Reply
QChronoD - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkEither I'm confused or there is an error in those graphs. The Samsung Series 7 and the Clevo W110ER both have 62Wh (according to the charts) and the Samsung beats it in all the tests. Yet when you normalized min/Wh the Clevo appears to be more efficient. Reply
drfish - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThe numbers for the Clevo battery life are wrong anyway - no one is getting that much use out of their systems on battery. They should be looked at again or not included in future benchmarks. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThe Samsung has a 77Wh battery; I've updated the charts for Dustin. As for the W110ER, I'm still not sure how Vivek got those numbers, so you'll have to ask him. Unfortunately, he no longer has the Eurocom Monster 1.0 -- I wonder if Eurocom actually managed to fix the battery life somehow and other Clevo W110ER units are still getting crappy power optimizations? I tested a W110ER from another company and got half the battery life; they ended up asking for the unit back to "look into the problem" and never sent another, so I assume there's a core issue that Clevo isn't fixing. Reply
drfish - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThanks for always replying to my posts about the W110ER's battery life. :)
I have no idea how many of them have been sold but I have to consider it "popular" for a niche device so if anyone at Anandtech wanted to look into it deeper I think there would be an audience eager to read their results. Maybe even see how a BIOS mod changes things (http://biosmods.wordpress.com/w110er/). Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkSadly, as you can imagine no one is really interested in sending us an "older" laptop like the W110ER, especially if all we're going to do is double-check the battery life (and probably end up disappointed). For the record, my test results from a system we ended up sending back before completing the review show the following with a 3610QM CPU:
Idle: 217 minutes
Internet: 209 minutes
H.264: 187 minutes
That last item tells you just how bad the battery life is (was?) optimized on that particular unit, as H.264 battery life is typically 2/3 of the Internet battery life, which in turn is about 80% of the Idle battery life. Based off of the "estimates", assuming the H.264 result is a good starting point, the W110ER should be getting 280 minutes Internet and 350 minutes Idle, and of course the H.264 result is already low to begin with.
Vivek's numbers on the Monster 1.0 actually seem perfectly legit (407, 338, 218 means Internet is 55% better than H.264 and Idle is 20% better than Internet). So the question is, how did Eurocom get such good results when no other W110ER seems to? Clevo is often pretty lousy at power management, and the P170EM and P150EM are right in that same categorization. They should be paying Eurocom for whatever fix is present in the Monster. Reply
drfish - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI would gladly pay Eurocom for that "fix" *sigh*
Thanks for the additional details! Reply
Drasca - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkI've got a Eurocom Monster 1.0 My battery life is in between Jarred's and Vivek's.
Last I checked, I can watch two 2 hr movies on VLC before it gets "low".
I'll can run a few battery life tests, but I do not have the exact anandtech suite or standardization. I'd appreciate any suggestions on what should be setup.
Display: AUO Matte Screen
GPU: Nvidia 650m 2 Gb
RAM: 8 Gb
Storage: Intel 520 256 Gb
Wifi card: Intel 3000 Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkGeneral settings: use the power saver profile, minimum CPU set to 0%, maximum set to 100%, and cooling set to passive. HDD set to go to sleep after 1 minute. WiFi is set to maximum power savings. Display is set to 100 nits (not sure where that is on the W110ER -- I think it's two or three steps down from max), and the display shouldn't turn off or dim. System critical battery life should shut down at 1% (or if you can't set that low, 3%) battery life, 0% reserve battery, and no sleep warnings. Basically, we're setting things up for best-case battery life.
Idle testing: run laptop until it's out of power (<3% battery). Audio should be muted, WIFi disabled, and that's it. I use a batch file to spit out the time every minute to a text file, and then you just subtract the start time from the finish time to get battery life. (Note that this is not truly idle, as the Batch file needs to access storage every minute.)
Internet testing: we open saved versions of four web pages every 60 seconds in Internet Explorer. Again I use a batch file to do this, that also spits out the time every minute. IE is set to empty temp files on exit. The batch file closes IE and restarts it, with the home pages set to these four: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/interne...
Sounds like Monster does have better battery life than stock W110ER, though, given you're able to watch four hours of movies. Reply
Drasca - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkI am not able to test internet at this time.
I'm able to set most of those settings to spec. Wifi adapter is disabled and wifi turned off. I've set display at 40% brightness on battery life.
It is setup for 1% battery life shutdown, sleep is disabled. Everything else set to your suggestions.
The laptop is currently running. 11 minutes have passed to reach 96%. Projected idle is around 260 minutes. Will report again once it is complete. Reply
Drasca - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkI'm at the 91 minute mark and there's still 70% left.
Projected idle is approx 300 min at this point.
That is in-line previous video use. Reply
Drasca - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - link4% at the 4 hr 25 minute (265 minute) mark.
System shutoff at 4 hrs 26 minutes as I was looking up the nvidia control panel.
Upon resume, reports 1% battery. Reply
Drasca - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkOk, there's a distinct possibility I have been testing in High Performance mode this entire time. If that is the case, then there's a battery floor for 266 minutes, and Vivek's numbers make more sense.
Additionally, I am distinctly not able to guarantee 100 nits.
I cannot do further testing today. Either way, we have another benchmark. Reply
JarredWalton - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkSo you measured 266 minutes at idle? Seems rather low compared to Vivek's numbers, unless some other setting is messed up. I just wish I had done the Monster 1.0 testing so I could respond with confidence in regards to the numbers. Reply
Drasca - Monday, September 24, 2012 - linkYes, I was able to reach 266 minutes minimum.
My setup is not a perfectly clean Win 7 build. I discovered I still had lavasoft ad aware, and some other processes in the backround (using minimal CPU, not doing active scans). I also suspect I have been doing high performance mode, requiring minimum 100% CPU as opposed to 0-5% and the brightness seemed higher than 100 nits even at 40%. That last bit is a subjective look, as I do not have light measuring equipment on hand.
I have the AUO matte display, which likely has different brightness characteristics than the one you and Vivek received.
So there's multiple variables. Mine look like there's been CPU usage, as its about what I expect from watching videos.
Still, Vivek's numbers are pretty amazing. Reply
shadowyani - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkCoasting by on the same chassis is not good. Happens across this company's entire lineup; my M18x R2 shares the same glaring design flaw (melting SLI cable hehe) as the R1, something they should have taken the time to fix. Good thing there's a workaround for people willing to pop the lid on the machine.
Speaking of price, if you're in the military you might be surprised at what you can get these machines for, but take my advice, skip out on the SLI laptops. The SLI cables aren't built last. Reply
5150Joker - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkMy SLI cable never melted... Reply
shadowyani - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI'm envious of your AW experience :) My R1 and replacement R2 both had cables that fried on top of the heat-sinks. It was a big sigh of relief when I discovered how easy it was to fix. I'm a happy AW camper now though. Reply
shadowyani - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkAt least the keyboard no longer ghosts. Reply
knekker - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI don't understand why Anandtech are wasting their time reviewing this laptop, when (appart from the CPU) MSI for quite some time has a significant better offer, compared to this overpriced brick.
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptop/msi_gt70_on... Reply
DanNeely - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI think that's the same laptop platform that they reviewed in iBuy Power branding a month ago. Specs aren't identical with laptopmag's test model; but reviewing two models of the same platform offers little value compared to looking at a second vendors design.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6173/ibuypower-valky... Reply
nerd1 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkM17XR4 with 7970M can be found around $1800 from various vendors - and 7970M is not too shabby against 680M and totally smokes 675M / 6990M GPU.
I'd rather get m17xr4 w/7970M than spending almost the same money to cz17 with 680M. If I'm paying almost $2000 for a gaming laptop, I won't get fugly laptops. Reply
tviceman - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkWhy does Nvidia hate memory bandwidth so much? Reply
DanNeely - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkhigh clock rates suck power; in mobile platforms they want to minimize that as much as possible. They're also not stupid and I see no reason not to assume their default GPU/memory clocks were picked to give the maximum average fps scores within their target TDP. Reply
Harmattan - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkI've owned and spent hours and hours with both single and dual configurations of the 7970m and 680m (have an m18x with dual 680ms right now). In single configuration, on an Alienware, 7970m is the way to go: drivers are nearly as good as nVidia's and performance with the 680m is neck-and-neck (which 680m being about 7% faster on avg.). The $250 lower price of the 7970m vs. the 680m wins.
That said, a single 7970m has problems on Clevo laptops in the form of AMD's god-awful power management system, Enduro. You see around 10% reduced performance on Clevos/Sagers when compared to Alienware's which do not have the Enduro issue. If you're going Clevo/Sager, go 680m.
Finally, 7970m Crossfire drivers are a bit of a mess: lower gains than nV and, in some games, no gain at all over a single GPU. If you're going dual GPU in a laptop, go 680m SLI. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkEnduro can be even more than a 10% loss of performance -- try more like 30-50% in some games (depending on settings). However, AMD is aware of the problem and tells me they're working on a fix that should hit in the next month. We'll see... 7970M Clevo review coming soon from me, though! Reply
prophet001 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkThat GPU is impressive. Even on Civ 5 it holds its own.
Nice review, nice laptop.
Thank you Reply
Death666Angel - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkReally a pity they didn't do any updates except replace the innards. If there every was a time to buy a gaming laptop, it would be today, 60 fps @1080p with their hardware being up to date until late 2013 when the new console generation hits. Not bad.
I like the HDMI in btw. Don't see that very often. :-) Reply
The0ne - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkHolding on to my M17xR2 until a "good" change comes along. I can't give up my screen resolution as I use mine for both work and home. I need the extra space. The second issue is that all the new versions are rehashes to me, as what you've said. I wouldn't mind a complete overhaul of the platform as it is beginning to get stale, outdated and as someone had mentioned before litter with defects from previous if they haven't address them (whether yours have them or not).
The R2 still runs great and I can get better performance even I do a video and cpu upgrade in the future. With this is the mix, I'm not looking forward to buying another anytime soon. Changing the screen back is a win/buy for me, instantly. They just have to do it :) Reply
will54 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkAre you talking about the 16:10 resolution? Also did the R2 have SLI or was that just the R1? Reply
rsgeiger - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - linkThe Alienware m17xR2 has a 16:10 aspect ratio RGB LED screen, and has 2 mxm slots for SLI and Crossfire. The Bios is also rather flexible as it allows up to 16gb of ram and gpu upgrades. I know people who have gotten m7970s to work in crossfire on the R2. It is the modder's laptop. :)
It does not support Optimus or Enduro. Reply
Notmyusualid - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkDam, if only I had known that... Reply
will54 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - linkJust wondering if Alienware 680M's have a mod for the Vbios like the MSI and Clevo 4GB models that are letting guys get over 8,000 3D11 scores? If not does the chip overclock well with the standard voltage? Reply
shatteredx - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - linkIt's significant to note that Alienware is the only company offering a laptop with a 17" 120hz display to go along with the 680m.
ASUS offers a 120hz version of their G75 but no 680m, which is very disappointing, as I am a big fan of their laptops. Reply
johnxfire - Monday, September 24, 2012 - linkOut of curiosity, why did you guys not opt to add in the latest 15" Clevos for comparison? Those can sport the HD 7970M, GTX 680M, and a flurry of other cards...
.. As most Clevos do! Reply
'nar - Monday, October 01, 2012 - linkAs an M17xR4 owner I had to point out an issue to potential buyers. I purchased the WD My Passport 2TB external USB 3.0 drive for this and it has a problem where it will constantly disconnect. Sometimes, it can transfer large files, but as it changes to a second or third file it disconnects.
I have troubleshot this in a forum with others since July. There has been an Alienware tech there that was not much help, and I called in on my own, but got nowhere. They do not support third party hardware, even though it is "universal." They will not tell us the results of their testing, or give us a work-around.
The problem is not just the big drive I have, but nearly all of the WD line. My guess is that the WD SES driver conflicts with the Intel chipset eXtensible driver, but I get no traction from WD either. The drive works fine in other computers, and it works fine when connected to the M17xR4 in the USB 2.0/esata port.
What irritates me most is the complete unwillingness to do anything. Support is one of the reasons I justified the price of purchase. I found a work-around: just use a USB 3.0 hub, powered or not. I got a small 2-port hub, and while it is a another adapter I need to carry, it is not too bulky. Why could WD or Alienware not suggest that? I think they do not want to admit any kind of responsibility.
While most of this has been negative, I do otherwise love this laptop. I chose it over the Clevo units to to design and sound/thermal characteristics. I do love the keyboard, although only an Alienware has me wanting more. I wish the colors would smoothly transition constantly rather than from one to another and then pop back. It is certainly bigger than the standard 17" size that most bags support, but it never fails to impress people when I pull it out. Reply
Imp@sse - Thursday, October 04, 2012 - linkA laptop which uses previous gen graphic card 675 (580) for more than $3000... thats what is in the alienware india site..
It seems as if they dont want to sell any laptops in India...charging RS 1,70,000 and dont even have the option of the 680m card...
They are dumping r2, r3 etc which the US customers dont buy on the Indian consumers and that too for more Reply
PitaChip - Friday, January 11, 2013 - linkI'm really gonna sound like an idiot here, because reading your posts, I understood about 1 out of 10 words/numbers you put there so I'll try my best. I'm a young gamer and I've been saving up for my own laptop for a while now and I really love the looks of alienware... I'm looking for high performance and speed. I'm not a huge whiner about screen quality... But i would love the extra convenience of having something like that... Would this laptop be a good recommendation? I just need a pointer because I really want something quality :) Reply
raok7 - Thursday, September 05, 2013 - linkthanks for your complete details guys its lovely to know on such topics!!!!!
http://www.aimaxprovider.com/index.php/magento-web... Reply