LG Optimus 2X & NVIDIA Tegra 2 Review: The First Dual-Core Smartphone
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on February 7, 2011 3:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Tegra 2
- LG
- Optimus 2X
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
The Partners and the Landscape
Although NVIDIA announced the Tegra 2 at CES 2010, it wasn’t until CES 2011 that we saw a single smartphone design win. Luckily for NVIDIA, we got two wins at this year’s CES: LG and Motorola.
Here’s how the landscape breaks down. In 2011 TI will have its OMAP4, used in the BlackBerry Playbook tablet and Qualcomm has its Snapdragon QSD8660. The QSD8660 will be used in upcoming HP/Palm and HTC devices later this year.
| 2011 SoC Landscape | ||||||
| NVIDIA | TI | Qualcomm | ||||
| Handset Partners |
LG Motorola Samsung (?) |
RIM/Blackberry Nokia (?) |
Dell HTC Huawei Sony Ericsson |
|||
This leaves us with Dell, Huawei, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Dell, Huawei and Sony Ericsson are all in Qualcomm’s camp. I’d expect that to continue. Nokia has shipped TI SoCs in the past, and I’d expect that to continue as well (if not TI, then Intel). That leaves us with Samsung. Samsung has typically shipped its own SoCs, however the recently announced Orion is still far from ready. With a hole in its roadmap, Samsung is rumored to be in NVIDIA’s camp for its next generation of Galaxy devices. And I don’t like posting rumors on AT.
All of the aforementioned SoC vendors have key design wins. NVIDIA went from being a no-show to a key player in the smartphone and tablet space. Did I mention that NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 is the reference SoC for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)?
NVIDIA’s roadmap ahead is equally impressive. NVIDIA secrets are leaking left and right, perhaps on purpose. At MWC 2011 NVIDIA is expected to announce the successor to the Tegra 2: the NVIDIA Tegra 2 3D. And late this year or at CES 2012, NVIDIA is expected to announce Tegra 3. Two new Tegra SoCs within a 12 month period? PC gaming veterans should recognize a very familiar pattern. NVIDIA looks to be bringing back the 6-month product cycle.
Frustratingly good execution is what helped establish NVIDIA in the PC GPU industry, and ultimately what drove competitors like 3dfx and Matrox out. Based on the leaked roadmaps, it looks like NVIDIA is trying to do the same thing with smartphone SoCs.
Tegra 2, Tegra 2 3D and Tegra 3 are all 40nm parts, and only Tegra 3 is a new architecture (GPU, not CPU). This is a deviation from NVIDIA’s old 6-month cadence, but we’ll see what Tegra 3 Ultra/Tegra 4 bring in 2012. If the follow up to Tegra 3 is a 28nm shrink, followed by a new architecture with Tegra 4 by the end of 2012/beginning of 2013 then NVIDIA may truly be up to its old tricks. But for now it’s too early to tell as Tegra 2 3D looks to just be a clock bump of Tegra 2.
Based on what’s been made public thus far, the Tegra 2 3D will add glasses-free 3D support (LG has already announced that it’ll be showing off the world’s first 3D smartphone at MWC 2011). Tegra 3D will also bump clock speeds from 1GHz to 1.2GHz. This boost is important as it’ll match Qualcomm’s QSD8660, which will ship at up to 1.2GHz
Little is known about Tegra 3. Based on the timing I’m guessing it’ll still be Cortex A9, however with some performance tweaks (and a faster/beefier GPU). NVIDIA has the design wins and it has the roadmap going forward.
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Exophase - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Thanks Anand.I'm surprised to hear that shot was from IMG, given that it was an IMG employee who made the comment originally about Tegra's 16-bit banding being evident on it, from the screenshot. Whoops. I do wonder what could be causing this, then.
Nonetheless, while that definitely makes my 16bit color claim invalid the depth buffer one should still hold. We might need to wait and see how much of a difference this actually makes, or rather how effective nVidia's 16-bit depth space is.
I'm glad to hear that you're as concerned about benchmarks on Android as I am. It's especially frustrating when I see people using them to try to indicate Atom being substantially better clock for clock than Cortex-A9.
Exophase - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Managed to miss this:"The test ramps from around 3k vertices to 15k vertices per frame, and 190k to 250k triangles per frame"
That line doesn't make any sense. How would you have hundreds of times more triangles than vertices? You must have meant something else.
sid1712 - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Great review as usual but i'm disappointed about the lack of details on the Sound Quality of the phone. A comparison of the sound quality (via headphone jack) alongside the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S (with Voodoo kernel preferrably) would give a good idea about the SQ of the phone.ScentedKandle - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Related to this, the audio codec lists "lossless" but doesn't mention what format. Can the audio chip natively decode FLAC?teldar - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
The order of buttons if the same as my droid x.Pjotr - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Does it really record 1920x1088? Does this unorthodox resolution play well on TVs, if you put it on a USB stick, for example?Brian Klug - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
It plays back from the phone properly, and most of the playback software just does a crop. A ton of devices actually produce 1088 and don't make note of it, it should playback fine.-Brian
unmesh - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
For active aka switching transistor power consumption, C*V^2*f (C is capacitance and f is frequency) is a better proxy than V^2/R.The conclusion that operating voltage has a huge effect remains the same.
Kevin098 - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Hey, can you make a video comparison between the iphone 4 retina display and Optimus 2x ?StormyParis - Monday, February 7, 2011 - link
Pages and pages of (apparently not very acurate, too) perf data, and not even one line on sound quality, which is one of my key buying points for a phone.No info on whether I'll be able to stream PC-resolution videos off my server to my bed over wifi.
Overall, not a very useful review. More like a dick size contest.