How Nvidia’s Tegra boosts Chromebook performance
Nvidia's innovative product launches indicate a bright future (Part 15 of 15)
Tegra enhanced the design and features of Chromebooks
As we have seen in the earlier part of the series, Google’s (GOOGL) Chromebooks use Nvidia’s (NVDA) Tegra processors. Nvidia’s Tegra K1 enables the Chromebook to drop the fan and at the same time have a slim profile. Acer Chromebooks claim to have performance at par with or even better than the Intel (INTC) processors in other Chromebooks.
Tegra processors are quite energy efficient, allowing the Acer Chromebook 13 to have 13 hours of battery life (or 11 hours with the 1080p display), which is more than double the average battery life of the top ten notebooks at Amazon.com.
In order to achieve superiority in the graphics space and at the same time retain high-end serial task performance, Nvidia’s Tegra K1 primarily makes use of 192 graphics cores based on the company’s Kepler architecture. There are no bottlenecks throughout the processing stages, as the graphics cores are paired up with a quartet of ARM A15 cores operating at 2.1 GHz.
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Nvidia claims the Tegra processor is superior to its peers
The Tegra K1’s efficiency lies in its ability to operate in an extremely low power mode when the applications are not required to take on the processor’s full capabilities. Along with its four standard processing cores, Nvidia has added a fifth low power core that operates exclusively in reduced usage scenarios. With this active and all other cores in their standby modes, the Tegra processor, as the above presentation shows, is one of the most energy efficient processors available.
Nvidia also claims that the Tegra K1 conserves battery life better than all of is peers currently do. Nvidia claims that Tegra K1 is superior to other processors like Exynos 5 Octa and Intel’s Bay Trail Celerons, which are currently available in the Chromebook space. Nvidia recently announced the launch of Tegra X1 as a follow-up to Tegra K1.
Chromebook’s growing popularity in the education space is threatening Microsoft
According to a report from Gartner in 2013, ~85% of Chromebook sales came from the education sector. During the 3Q14 earnings call, Google confirmed that it had sold more than 1 million Chromebooks in the education sector. The growing popularity of Google’s (GOOGL) Chromebooks as well as the increased penetration of Apple (AAPL) Macbooks is posing a severe threat to (MSFT) Microsoft.
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