14 DAY TRIAL // In a bold statement, Amazon’s CEO, Mr. Jeff Bezos, claims that the processor inside the new tablets launched by the company today is actually faster than the popular Tegra 3 SoC designed by Nvidia.
We were quite surprised with the claims as we know that these are both ARM processors that have multiple cores based on ARM’s Cortex A9 design.
The more striking aspect about Mr. Bezos’ claims is the fact that OMAP 4470 inside Amazon’s tablet has two Cortex A9 cores while Nvidia’s Tegra 3 has four Cortex A9 cores when high-performance mode is active.
How exactly would the new Kindle tablet be faster by having half of the cores?
The OMAP 4470 mobile processor inside Amazon’s tablet is designed by American company Texas Instruments and it is manufactured in 45 nm technology in TI’s own FABs.
The maximum rated frequency is 1.8 GHz while the LPDDR2 memory works at 466 MHz on a 32-bit wide BUS in dual-channel mode.
The iGPU is based on Imagination’s PowerVR SGX544 architecture and works at 384 MHz and packs a dedicated 2D core, as well.
Theoretically, on paper, some of OMAP’s capabilities are superior to what Nvidia’s Tegra 3 is able to do.
OMAP 4470 can do 12 billion floating point operations per second while Tegra 3 can do only 8 billion, and this puts TI’s SoC 50% ahead of Nvidia’s chip and the dual-channel LPDDR2 memory on the TI chip reaches a wide 7.5 GB/s bandwidth.
Again, this makes OMAP 4470 look almost 50% faster than Tegra 3 as the Nvidia SoC only has 5.3 GB/s memory bandwidth.
In the eyes of Mr. Jeff Bezos, these reportedly make OMAP 4470 faster than Nvidia’s Tegra 3, but we would rather wait for detailed benchmarks before judging.
The PowerVR SGX544 iGPU also has roughly the same computing power as Nvidia’s GeForce Kal-El.
Although clear characteristics of Nvidia’s Kal-El are not available, we know that at 300MHz, PowerVR SGX544 can do 19.2 GFLOPS while Nvidia’s GeForce ULP does just 4.8.
Even if the Kal-El GeForce were three times faster than the GeForce ULP, it would still have less computing power than the PowerVR SGX544.
Read here, Nvidia's official reaction to Mr. Jeff Bezos' claims.
