NVIDIA Tegra 4 Architecture Deep Dive, Plus Tegra 4i, Icera i500 & Phoenix Hands On
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on February 24, 2013 3:00 PM ESTThe Cortex A9 r4p1
Although we just call ARM’s previous architecture by its Cortex A9 name, there have been multiple revisions to the A9 architecture since its introduction. Tegra 2 implemented Cortex A9 r1p1, while Tegra 3 used r2p9. With Tegra 4i, NVIDIA moved to the absolute latest version of the Cortex A9 core: r4p1.
There are some significant changes to the Cortex A9 in r4p1. The GHB, L2 TLB and BTAC all grew by 4x and are now sized equally between the A9 and A15 implementations (16K predictors, 512 entries and 4096 entries, respectively). These changes help improve branch prediction accuracy, which further increases IPC on an already very efficient design.
The A9 r4p1 also has an enhanced data prefetching engine, including a small L1 prefetcher and dedicated hardware for the cache preload instruction.
NVIDIA claims a 15% increase in SPECint_base for the Cortex A9 r4p1 vs. r2p9, which is pretty impressive. Combined with the 2.3GHz max frequency, Tegra 4i’s CPU performance should be a healthy improvement over what we have in Tegra 3 today.
Tegra 4 Clock Speeds
Each of the four primary Cortex A15s is driven off the same voltage and frequency plane, although each core can be power gated individually. This is similar to how Intel designs its processors, but at odds with Qualcomm’s independent voltage/frequency planes.
NVIDIA does a good job of binning its SoCs, and the same will continue with Tegra 4. All four cores are capable of running at up to 1.9GHz, although NVIDIA claims we may see configurations with even higher single core boost frequencies (or even lower max frequencies, similar to Tegra 3). As I already mentioned, the fifth Cortex A15 runs at somewhere between 700 and 800MHz.
The Tegra 4 GPU operates at up to 672MHz, up from the 520MHz max in Tegra 3.
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klmccaughey - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Definitely. All good for us too! :)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).
But in favor of quad-core: software might start using cores a little more effectively w/time--Google and Apple are apparently trying to make WebKit able to do things like HTML parsing and JavaScript garbage collection in the background, and Microsoft's browser team backgrounds JavaScript compilation. And the other uses of space are also only sort-of useful, and cores (like GHz) are handy for marketing. I can't say I know what the right tradeoff for NVidia is, only that there were were other seemingly-interesting options.
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.
twotwotwo - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Def 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.
sosadsohappy - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Samsung 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.
s44 - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
4+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...sosadsohappy - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Yes. 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!
Krysto - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Too 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.
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.
Wilco1 - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link
Given 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.