Thanks to a report from ExtremeTech, NVIDIA may have bumped up their release roadmap by sucking Tegra 6 aka “Parker” from 2015. Instead, Parker will see the light of day in late 2014 itself, and will also be the first 64-bit NVIDIA chipset. The report is based on new findings which indicate NVIDIA licensed and began working on ARMv8 64-bit architecture back in late 2010/early 2011 itself. 64-bit “Denver” cores should be ready for sampling in early 2014 itself.
No one can deny that Tegra 4 is a much more competitive chip than the Tegra 3 was last year, but Qualcomm’s custom Krait cores and quick design iteration have allowed it to nearly take over the Android device ecosystem. There are only a handful of devices announced with Tegra 4 chips, and one of them is Nvidia’s own Shield console. Meanwhile Snapdragon 600 and 800 power almost every high-end smartphone and tablet from 2013.
Over the last few years, Nvidia has no doubt poured many millions of dollars into Project Denver and the Parker SoC. Qualcomm is surely working toward a 64-bit chip down the road, but the company has been tight-lipped about future plans. The last thing Nvidia wants is for the market leader to beat it to ARMv8 with 64-bit. Whether or not 64-bit has real utility on mobile devices running 32-bit software, getting this right could set up Tegra for undeniable success, a distinction that has so far eluded it.
Thank you NextPowerUp and ExtremeTech for providing us with this information.
Images courtesy of ExtremeTech.
Undoubtedly 64 bit mobile computing is the next step forward. No harm with nVidia being the first and we’re bound to see some 64 bit software as soon as 64 bit Android devices start popping up. 32 bit mobile computing days are numbered.
isn’t the chip in the iphone 5s the first commercial 64 bit mobile processor?
To the best of my knowledge, the new Apple 5S has a 64 bit processor chip. If it has then we should see Qualcomm, nVidia etc. stepping all over each other playing catchup.
This is only my assumption as I’m not really genned up in the mobile market but I don’t see it behaving differently to the desktop market (as we knew it).
Just like the 32 bit desktop days were numbered…
64 bit architecture doesn’t bring as much advantages as we would like to, even though hardware is 64 bit, software remains 32 bit, being emulated through built-in virtual machines and so on.
The biggest(if not only) reason to go 64 bit on mobile devices is that RAM size grows in time and 32 bit address space won’t be enough soon.
No doubt we’ll be seeing 64 bit Android/Windows phones pretty soon and it shouldn’t take much longer after that before we see 64 bit apps showing up in force. 32 bit phones won’t be a spent force once 64 takes hold but their days are numbered.
The only reason we see 32 bit software is because there are still 32 bit machines on the market. By switching to 64 it you are not only able to take advantage of the significantly faster architecture and more ram, you are helping the 32 bit systems phase out.
So the the chip will comes put late 2014 and yet it will be the first 64 bit ARM processor for Android? Hmm i heard that samsung S5 will feature 64 bit cpu and might come out as soon as january or february next year. So wouldn’t that samsung will come out with 64 bit cpu for android first? 😀
Anyway the speculation is nvidia want to have 64 bit processor in 2014 hence they pull Parker into 2014 instead of 2015 since Parker might be the first nvidia ARM SoC with 64 bit ARM cpu. But an article on Forbes are talking about logan will use 64 bit cpu and logan expected to comes out in Q1 next year. If logan indeed based on 64 bit cpu then nvidia could be the first with 64bit cpu on android (well if the rumor about samsung s5 with 64 bit cpu are not coming this next jan/feb time frame).