Is it the right way to go?

NVIDIAs Tegra 3 is a clever and creative combination of the advantages of TSMCs 40LP and 40LPG manufacturing processes. 40LP, which is used for the companion core offers very good energy efficency. On the other hand there is the 40LPG process, which NVIDIA uses for the four other cores. These therefore offer a lot of performance. In the end Tegra 3 becomes a highgly competitive product, being both energy efficent and powerful.

It was a strategically good descision of NVIDIA to invest in the development of SoCs. Especially if you think about the success of the Apple iPadand the generally booming market for Tablet PCs it makes a lot of sense having a competitive product in this market. Furthremore two of NVIDIAs competitors, namely AMD and Intel, don't even have an SoCs ready. Intels SoC version of Atom turned out to be a flop as it wasn't competitive from an energy efficiency point of view. With AMD the situation is even worse. They haven even touch the SoC market until today. At least their new CEO Rory Read is now pushing towards this direction but it will take at least two to three year from now until AMD can offer a solid product. The big boy for SoCs are Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Samsung at the moment. These days NVIDIA has a comfortable advantage over Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, because their first quad core SoC will make it to market earliest in three to six months. Nevertheless these to SoCs are expected to be manufactured at 28 nanometer. At least NVIDIA has a comfortable time window now and we're sure their preparing preparing the transition to a 28 nanometer manufacturing process already right now.

Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Less Leakage Power

Page 3 - Cache Hierarchie and Clock Speeds

Page 4 - Is it the right way to go?

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