Tegra 4 to be more than a generational leap, GPGPU included

VR-Zone has got their hands on some new leaks regarding Nvidia's next generation Tegra mobile SoC, likely to be labelled as Tegra 4. The upcoming 28nm chip is said to be getting GPGPU support in order to boost CUDA, OpenCL and other general purpose activities.

The addition of GPGPU hints that Nvidia is putting more emphasis on the GPU, something they have failed to do so far. This would indicate a multiple generation stepup over the current 2006-era Tegra 3 GPU. Tegra 3 currently falls well behind the new Apple A5X chipset find in the new iPad in terms of graphics performance.

It is possible that Tegra 4 will use the Kepler core introduced with the Geforce GTX 680 last week. This would not be all that suprising considering Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has already said Nvidia has plans to bring Kepler to mobile chips.

The next generation Tegra chip could also include a quadruplet of ARM Cortex A15 cores with at least 24 GPU cores. As a rough comparison the GPU found in Tegra 3 only has 12. Also expected is integrated celluar chipsets due to Nvidia's acquisition of Icera, so far phone manufacturers have been forced to use Qualcomm chips to offer LTE support in Tegra powered smartphones and tablets.

It is expected that we may see Tegra 4 late this year but a rumoured Tegra 3 refresh un-originally named Tegra 3+ could delay this by at least a few months.

Kitguru says: It's about time anyone outside of Apple focused on the GPUs they use in their mobile chipsets.

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