Nvidia introduces the newTEGRA SoC(System on Chip)

NVIDIA announced its second generation Tegra SoC. It's creatively named the Tegra 2 and this is what it looks like in block diagram form:

The SoC is made up of 8 independent processors, up from 7 in the original Tegra. The first two are - a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores. These are dual-issue out of order cores from ARM running at up to 1GHz.

The next processor is an audio decode core. NVIDIA acquired PortalPlayer in 2007 for somewhere around $350M. PortalPlayer SoCs were used in the first five generations of iPods. PortalPlayer contributed to much of NVIDIA's know how when it came to building SoCs and audio decoders. NVIDIA is particularly proud of its audio decode core, claiming that it can deliver system power in the low 10s of mW while playing an MP3. It's difficult to quality that claim. Microsoft lists Zune HD battery life at 33 hours while playing MP3s, while Apple claims the iPod Touch can do the same for 30 hours. 

Tegra's video decode processor accelerates up to 1080p high profile H.264 video at bitrates in the 10s of megabits per second. The Samsung SoC in the iPhone 3GS is limited to only 480p H.264 decode despite Samsung claiming 1080p decode support on its public Cortex A8 SoC datasheets. NVIDIA insists that no one else can do 1080p decode at high bitrates in a remotely power efficient manner. Tegra's 1080p decode can be done in the low 100s of mW. NVIDIA claims that the competition often requires well over 1W of total system power to do the same because they rely on the CPU to do some of the decoding. Again, this is one of those difficult to validate claims. Imagination has demonstrated very low CPU utilization 1080p H.264 decode on its PowerVR SGX core, but I have no idea of the power consumption.

The GPU in Tegra 2 is the same architecture as Tegra 1 (OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported), just higher performance. NVIDIA expects a 2 - 3x performance increase thanks to improved efficiency, more memory bandwidth and a higher clock rate.

The original Tegra only supported LPDDR1, while Tegra 2 supports LPDDR2. The Zune HD's Tegra SoC had a 32-bit 333MHz datarate LPDDR1 memory bus, resulting in 1.33GB/s of memory bandwidth. Tegra 2 in a single package with integrated memory should deliver about twice that.