Nvidia wants you to believe you need a quad-core LTE phone

There’s a few buzzwords floating around in mobile right now, one of them LTE and the other multi-core. We are told we need both, and Nvidia is doing its best to make sure that happens.

The company announced Friday ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it struck deals with two companies that produce LTE basebands, GCT Semiconductor and Renesas Mobile. This is expected to speed development of Tegra 3 chips with integrated LTE. It also puts Nvidia on par with competitors Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, which arealready offering integrated LTE radios on their own system-on-a-chip solutions.

Nvidia’s been pretty busy with Tegra 3 lately. The chip has been considered for use in netbooks and laptops, and the company has been actively promoting the platform as a way to take mobile gaming to the next level. Adding LTE on top of this only sweetens the pot.

MWC 2012 will see the first in a series of Tegra 3-powered devices, with LG debuting its just-announced Optimus 4X HD smartphone. While the Optimus has an impressive feature set, the company is mum on whether or not it includes LTE. That could be due to some incompatibilities with Tegra 3 and LTE — which have been rumored and debunked — or simply that LG did not want to steal Nvidia’s thunder. There’s also the possibility that Nvidia did not have an SoC solution with LTE ready, but we don’t know because nobody is talking.

Although this might sound all well and good, the question still remains whether we are truly ready for quad-core yet or even LTE for that matter. As you might have remembered reading back in November, many of us here at ExtremeTech are not exactly sold on the idea of quad-core mobile chips. The simple fact is that app development is not there and in many cases neither is battery life technology. Those are big negatives.

The same goes for LTE. While the carriers are making a big deal out of the promise of the technology, LTE still covers only a fraction of the population, and in some cases is not much faster than previous generation standards. There’s also the battery life problem (see this primer on LTE), which calls into question the viability of putting two battery draining features onto one device.

It’s a tough argument to make that we don’t need these technologies, but it’s valid to argue that we may not be ready for more power-intensive technologies quite yet. Simply put, it’s a case of technology moving faster than capability.

Read more about Tegra 3 and LTE

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Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs arriving April 2012

According to Taiwanese OEMs, April 8 will be the day that you can get your hands on desktop and mobile Ivy Bridge CPUs. These will be the first commercial chips that use a 22nm process, and — perhaps more importantly — the first silicon chips that use 3D tri-gate transistors (FinFET), instead of ye olde MOSFET that every other manufacturer and foundry are still using.

A total of 13 CPUs will be released on or around April 8: Seven desktop chips will be immediately available, all priced between $332 and $184 and targeted at the low- and mid-range market, the fastest being a Core i7-3770K. Six mobile chips spanning the entire price gamut will be available, including a high-end $1100 Core i7-3920Qm. Chipsets for both desktop and mobile will also be released, including the top-end Z77, and H77, Z75, and B75, and their mobile equivalents.

Before you get too excited, though, bear in mind that Ivy Bridge is not a performance update to Sandy Bridge. Where Sandy Bridge was the tock — new architecture — following Westmere, Ivy Bridge is the tick (die shrink) of Intel’s tick-tock release strategy. That doesn’t mean that IB isn’t faster than SB — some leaked benchmarks show a 2-8% gain — but primarily, Ivy Bridge will consume less power. According to Intel, the Core i7-3770k will have a TDP of just 77 watts, down from 95W on the current top-end i7-2700K.

This is obviously big news for the mobile sector where the CPU, along with the display and backlight, make up the bulk of a device’s power consumption. Presumably, with Intel’s 2012 focus being smartphones, ultrabooks, and the success of Medfield, almost everyone at Intel is focusing on reducing power footprints. Laptops might be by far the most dominant PC form factor, but if I can build a desktop PC that’s fast, saves power, and cuts down on CPU core temperature, I’m not going to complain. The other big change, though it probably won’t affect many ExtremeTech readers, is that Ivy Bridge chips will feature a new, slightly-less-awful integrated GPU.

The power savings, incidentally, most likely stem from the use of 3D FinFETs in Ivy Bridge, and other advances in silicon chip fabrication technologies. Medfield will have to wait until 2013 or 14 for its 3D FinFET re-work, but when it eventually happens Intel might even move ahead of ARM-based designsin terms of power consumption.

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