Welcome to another editorial where we throw our opinions at you and you tell us we are completely wrong, completely right or sort of in the middle. Today’s journey will take place in a land not to far from here called Terga 3 and the misconceptions some sites are portraying about this land not being as good as it should be.
In a non-geek way of saying the above statement, this editorial is about the recent articles that seem to be popping up about how Tegra 3 is a let down and not good enough as it should be. It is really stretching the line when it comes to saying statements like this on a product that isn’t even available for purchase yet. Until a product is actually available for purchase to the general population, it is in development.
One statement is about the battery life of a Tegra 3 device. One thing I’m curious about is how people can judge battery life of a product that isn’t even out yet. nVidia has taken steps to improve battery like and power consumption through the use of a fifth-core, a companion core as it is being called, in order to regulate how many cores are active during the time you are using your phone. If you need two core then two are fired up. If you only need one, then all four are shut down and the fifth companion core deals with that particular low power activity. If you need all four, such as with heavy gaming, then all four are fired up.
This is all done to help improve battery life and power consumption but as of right now, this is generally just words and aside from some short hands-on some random people got, there has been no hardcore real life testing of this.
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I’m going to take an example of this kind of reporting from an article Ray Walters wrote about quad-core Android devices:
The logic that runs through their heads is that the more cores a device has, the better it must be. Technically, that’s correct. More cores means more power, which brings out the Tim the Tool Man in anyone. But purchasing a quad-core device right now is equivalent to buying a really nice chainsaw, then using it cut grass.
While this may be correct for the average use, power users benefit more from quad-core over dual-core. This is especially true for gamers who not only want the next best game out to play but want to be able to enjoy it and all it has to offer. This means that you also need the equivalent technology to properly run that game. Even if you are not a hardcore gamer, you still benefit from having a quad-core device as generally most programs will run better on a quad-core device over a single- or dual-core one.
People seem to forget that as your chipset goes up in power, you need the appropriate sideline hardware to be able to run it efficiently. This means better and more RAM, more storage and so on. Each quad-core device will be coming with all of these things. Sure the average user might not need a quad-core device but they will surely benefit from having one even if it is just on a performance level.
Another issue that seems to be a stick to beat the Tegra 3 horse with is that Tegra 2 devices have some lag at times. That is a general statement that shouldn’t be used. I have multiple Tegra 2 devices and have yet to experience any lag whether it’s loading times or just switching between home screens. There are plenty of factors that come into play with a performance issue such as this including whether or not you have rooted your phone and if so the ROM you’re using, if you are using one that is.
Other factors include things like if you are taking care of your device, what version of the OS you are running, how many background processes you have going, whether a program has been coded poorly and is hogging resources and so on.
Another way this is being reported is through trying to interpret a companies decision to go with one chipset instead of another. Just because a company uses a specific chipset all the time, like Tegra 2 for example, and then decided to switch it up and release a phone with a TI or Qualcomm chip in it, doesn’t mean that suddenly they are making that decision because the future chipset, such as Tegra 3, is a let down or poor performer. What it means is that the company, for whatever reasons they only know, have decided to stick a different chip in that particular device. Reading any more into it is basically just assuming things.
One other interesting note is that some sites are telling early adopters of technology to wait on this because it’s an ‘unproven technology’. Obviously it’s unproven in the sense that it hasn’t been released out into the world for public consumption yet. Anyone who happens to be an early adopter of technology knows that it can come with a price and sometimes that price happens to be some initial bugs that come up regardless of how much the manufacturer tests things first. Again, this is no reason to suggest that Tegra 3 isn’t as good as the hyper suggestions.
In the end perhaps I’m coming off a Tegra fanboy but if it were about any other processor I would be posting the same thing just with the name switch to whatever chipset was in question. The whole point of me babbling on like this is that you can’t really condemn a product that really hasn’t even had a serious hands-on yet. What we do know is this: Tegra 3 currently has some impressive benchmark scores across the board over dual-core, single-core and Apple’s A5 chipset. No matter what you use your device for, you’ll always see improvements and benefits from having more power pumping in the background while you use your device.
To me it just seems somewhat dumb to pass judgement on a product that isn’t even out yet in any real capacity. When it gets released and if it blows then so be it but at least wait till it’s released.
Let me know your feeling on the subject in the comments below. Are articles that pass judgement on an unreleased product just clickbait? Do you agree with them? Do you think Tegra 3 will still rock it even if it is slightly less in power than originally reported? Am I talking out of my ass? Let us know!
