Published in PC Hardware

Tegra 2 needs less power than the original Tegra

by on10 January 2011
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Two cores aren’t too demanding
Imagine this, Tegra 2 dual core needs less power than a single core Tegra one especially while idling. We heard this from one of the product managers of Tegra who showed us LG Optimus 2X and the latest dual core Motorola.

Nvidia obviously learned a lot from Tegra one to Tegra 2. Tegra one as most of you know had one serious design win, the Zune HD while the rest of the attempts tanked. Still, this multi-billion adventure made Nvidia think a lot about low power chip development.

Idle power will get better and if you can expect that the dual core phones will have a very similar power requirements as the current single cores. Naturally these mobile cores change the clock according to the load, so a dual-core won’t always have both cores enabled and they won’t run at 1GHz all the time. These days are long gone in the chip industry, as power efficiency is becoming increasingly important in all market segments.

The OS will be able to change the clocks and save a lot of energy. Another thing to have in mind is that a screen on Tablet or a mobile phone's screen uses up almost 70 percent of the battery.

Tegra 2 also plays Full HD with less than 200 milliwatts and just a few years back you needed a proper CPU or discrete graphics to do this.

AMD wants Brazos desktops under $99

 

Price in Taiwan $119 and up

 

Brazos platform is based on Zacate dual core CPU and AMD has a very high

expectations from this business. Zacate needs a passive fan and fits in

micro ITX format cases.

 

We saw that Power Color and Sapphire have systems and boards based on

Brazos but both of these companies wants to price their small systems at

119 and up. This is FOB price in Taiwan and you need to ad local taxes and

some profit margin for distribution and etail / retail sales.

 

Since you can buy a decent notebook for around $300, the price has to go

down, but in order to match desired $99, AMD partners will have to shave

some features like USB 3.0 and some other fancy things.

 

Since Brazos can run fanless, we can see many home thater loves getting

these as they are just great for it, plus you can play some games on its

Radeon HD 6310 part of the APU.

Last modified on 10 January 2011
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