The NVIDIA Blog

Tegra 3 Honored With Linley Group Analysts’ Choice Award

Posted: 23 Jan 2012 10:55 AM PST

The CES booths are packed away and most of the demos are long forgotten. But the accolades for Tegra 3 keep rolling in.

Semiconductor research firm The Linley Group today bestowed its inaugural Analysts' Choice Award 2011 on the Tegra 3 processor for its "performance, power, features and cost."

"NVIDIA's Tegra 3 is the first mobile processor with four primary CPU cores, delivering twice the peak CPU performance of competing dual-core processors," said Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst at The Linley Group. "To balance the power equation, NVIDIA added a unique low-power core that takes over when peak performance is not needed, extending battery life."

A handful of Tegra 3's features worked in concert to impress the analysts at The Linley Group. Let's take a quick look at what makes the latest Tegra quad-core processor so uniquely suited to today's mobile computing needs.

Variable SMP Architecture (Companion Core)

From console-quality games to marked power efficiency, the Tegra 3's Variable SMP architecture gives it double the performance of dual-core processors while sipping less power.

Although formally known as a quad-core processor, the Tegra 3 sneaks in a fifth companion core – a design that we refer to as the Variable SMP architecture. This battery friendly "Ninja Core" sits in the background, waiting to unburden the performance cores. During low intensity task – such as browsing the web, browsing photos, watching videos or downloading new apps – Tegra 3 automatically shuts down the four performance cores and offloads all processing duties to the fifth core. Check out the "Ninja Core" in action here.

It's "this combination of excellent performance and innovative design techniques" that gives the Tegra quad-core processor an edge over a fierce pack of competitors.

Find more info on Tegra 3 Variable SMP architecture here.

For more info about The Linley Group Analysts' Choice Award 2011, check out www.linleygroup.com