Nvidia Tegra 2 Is Already Superior than Intel Atom – Chief Exec of Nvidia

From X-bit Labs: While Nvidia Corp. has been talking about incredible performance of its second-generation Tegra system-on-chip (SoC) for several months now, since there are no devices powered by Tegra 2, the actual performance of the SoC is still not quite clear. The chief executive officer of Nvidia said this week in an interview that performance of Tegra 2 is, in fact, higher than that of Intel Atom, the chip that powers the vast majority of netbooks.

“Tegra 2 is already much superior to Atom from a performance perspective,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief exec of Nvidia, in an interview with LaptopMag web-site.

Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC does have rather impressive specs: it features dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 central processing unit, GeForce graphics core with programmable pixel shader and programmable vertex shader support (OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible), build-in low-power DDR2 memory controller, NAND flash memory controller, audio processor, high-definition video processor that supports MPEG 4, H.264, VC-1/WMV9 decoding, H.264 and MPEG4 encoding and features some other capabilities. Nvidia claims that Tegra 2 has about four times performance advantage compared to the first-generation Tegra SoC.

Actual performance of Tegra 2 compared to Intel Atom is rather hard to validate, considering the fact that the chips are incompatible and cannot run the same software. If Nvidia Tegra 2 is indeed faster than the latest Atom processors, then netbooks are in danger since tablets powered by Tegra promise to have longer battery life than netbooks. On the other hand, Intel has its Atom Z600-series SoC platform, which will show up shortly in actual devices, which will reduce overall power consumption, but will retain x86 compatibility. But according to Mr. Huang, the code-named Moorestown platform is just an elephant on a diet.

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