[Noisebridge-discuss] nVidia Tegra ARM/Geforce based Single Chip Computer

Dr. Jesus j at hug.gs
Tue Jun 2 19:01:13 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 11:38:51AM -0700, d p chang wrote: 
> > In the opensource world, who needs Intel.  I mean,
> > seriously?http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACC
> 
> hmmm... maybe not the place for this discussion, but i'd say that intel
> has been 'friendlier' than nvidia (at least lately). 
> 
> anyway, i have no special knowledge of tegra, but an arm isn't doing
> 1080p decode in software for 10hrs on battery power (at least not from
> x264 or vc1 or one of the 'common' hd formats). if you want to do
> something w/ your machine other than graphics you may be sol (pointer
> chasing code isn't what gpus are good at).

Which is why tegra has dedicated vector units for that stuff.  If it's
anything like the set-top box chipsets I've worked with, the ARM
probably just deframes the incoming stream and the decoding is done by
special code loaded into the vector units.

I can think of any number of chips off the top of my head which can do
1080p decode in less than 10 watts -- ST7109, MG3500, SH7xxx, whatever
Toshiba shipped last year, and all those cheap MIPS SoCs coming out of
China these days.



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