HP Announces Tegra 4 Powered Slate7 Extreme and Slate8 Pro
by Jarred Walton on September 19, 2013 5:19 PM EST
Several weeks ago, HP announced their second Tegra 4 powered device, the HP Slatebook x2 10.1” hybrid with a 1080p display. Their first Tegra 4 device was announced back in June: the gigantic Slate21 All-In-One, also with a 1080p display. Obviously the latter targets a very different use case, but there are many users that want something smaller and more portable than even a 10.1” tablet. For those, HP is now adding two more Tegra 4 tablets to their lineup, the Slate7 Extreme (not to be mistaken with the Slate7 HD, which is not a Tegra 4 tablet) and the Slate8 Pro.
We don’t have full specs for either tablet, but the Slate8 will feature a 4:3 aspect ratio display, and HP claims that it has the “highest resolution available on a tablet of its size”, apparently a 1600x1200 panel (and we’d assume that’s an IPS display, though HP doesn’t say). HP isn’t talking battery life yet, or any of the other specs really, so all we have to go on is Tegra 4 and its Cortex-A15 core with 72-core GeForce GPU. We know there’s a camera as well, but we don’t have any information on resolution.
The Slate7 Extreme has the same SoC, but this time with a smaller 7” 1280x800 display. The Slate7 also includes a stylus using NVIDIA’s DirectStylus technology, which opens up some additional use cases. HP lists the Slate7 as coming with 16GB, and there’s an HDMI port that allows you to connect it to a TV (and the same should be true of the Slate8).
Getting back to Tegra 4, NVIDIA’s SHIELD clocks the SoC at up to 1.9GHz, but HP could be using lower clocks for their tablets. As far as performance goes, Tegra 4 is quite fast but it looks like it will be slower than the new A7 at the heart of the iPhone 5s. GPU performance is a bit murkier, with Tegra 4 sometimes doing well (GFXBench 2.7.0 T-Rex HD and Egypt HD for instance have it on par with the A7 and Qualcomm MSM8974), but other times it falls behind (fill rate in particular looks to be a weak point – or a strong point of the A7 GPU). Given the variety of Android tablets along with NVIDIA’s willingness to help optimize gaming performance, however, we expect Tegra 4 will remain competitive.
Availability of both the Slate7 Extreme and Slate8 Pro is scheduled for November, with pricing to be announced at a later date.
Source: HP PR
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ananduser - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Is that a standard practice ? I thought tech sites/blogs are at last emailing for a review unit - especially for some of the more exotic hardware(like 40+ mpx phones). Meh, in that case I retract my previous whining on the abundance of the reviews.JarredWalton - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
We email companies regularly, yes, but not every company really wants an AnandTech depth review, and there's also the question of how many reviews any person can pull off. A full laptop review for instance requires pretty much a solid week of work (around 40 hours), which means if I have three laptops on my plate already, I'm not going to go around emailing companies asking for [generic laptop x]. On the tablet and smartphone side, it's pretty much the same story, and the choice is either to seriously curtain the detail in a review or else focus on a more limited number of products.thesavvymage - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
they get either what they own, or what they are sent. They do not go out and purchase hardware for the sake of reviewing it. They already benched shield, which is T4 at its best and it wasnt overly impressive.eiriklf - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I'm sorry, but just because apple updated safari and geekbench results are now boosted by "cryptographic instructions" does not mean the A7 is way ahead of the competition.ArthurG - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
+1000Except some very specific HW accelerated benchmarks (mainly encrypted related), T4 A15 CPU is faster than A7. Please stop the FUD Anand...
Wilco1 - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
In 32-bit mode A7 does beat Shield on Geekbench even without HW acceleration of AES. They are close though, a 2GHz A15 would get similar performance as a 1.3GHz A7. However A7 shines in 64-bit mode, pulling well ahead, not because of HW AES but primatily due to the new 64-bit ARM ISA. Until we get A57 I'd expect A7 to remain the fastest ARM.ArthurG - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
You picked up one example only. Let me take a different one: In 3Dmark CPU physics test, T4 is 2 times faster than A7. So why take Geekbench and not 3DMark ?And I don't agree that A7 will remain the fastest ARM SoC until A57. in 3 months, Nvidia Logan with A15 R4 on HPM at 2.3Ghz will blow away A7 in both CPU and GPU...
Wilco1 - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Obviously in multithreaded tests T4 will win due to having twice as many cores as A7. Apple could easily make a quad core version if they wanted, but core for core A7 will be unbeaten for quite a while.Logan is officially in Q2 next year, so if it will be out before the end of this year that would be amazing - but very unlikely. At least in Geekbench I don't think 2.3GHz will be enough to equal A7 on INT and FP in 64-bit mode but should beat it in 32-bit mode.
TheJian - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
Exactly how much AES encryption do you expect to do on your phone/tablet?...ROFL. Probably about as much as I plan on doing content creation on one. How much 64bit crap do you think matters in the next year on a phone/tablet? Or even the year after? Not much.I want games out to TV with a gamepad so I have no need for a console. Portable movies/games/browsing when on the go. I don't use a tablet for encryption. It's kind of like having DX11.2 on a tablet. Turning on all it's features would result in 1fps.
If T4 was super fast at making hamburger, I'd tell you they wasted their engineering time too :) I don't make hamburger with my tablet :) It's about the games silly, not encryption (maybe one day your comment makes sense, not today and not in a phone/tablet). Also Apple is a small portion of the entire market and walled off on top of that. Apple will continue to shrink until they make gaming the central point of their devices (they do have a console coming, but where is the 1B+ game announcement like MS for xbox1?).
Enterprise mail made Rimm special. Everyone has it now, so down goes rimm. Appstore, Retina etc made apple special, but now everyone has all that crap and a good soc, so down goes apple. Modems made Qcom special, but now everyone has one out or coming early next year in a soc, so down goes qcom (check their margins/ Qreport - trend is down now). The new THING to have is GAMING, which at least to QCOM credit they hired 30 devs to show off their tech (though we've seen nothing yet, and they don't make a single game, just to show off stuff). NV and maybe AMD if they hurry, is about to take 20yrs of that experience and slap it's desktop gpu into a SOC. Tegrazone already has a pretty huge lead (surely working with Valve on steambox etc will further NV branding). Kepler is already very well known inside and out by game devs, so making stuff compatible with Kepler Mobile will be an easy task (same with AMD stuff coming providing they start making money to fund a decent race year after year). Don't forget the people that were kings in SOC GPU's were sent there by AMD/NV. IMG.L (who makes all apple gpus) failed on the desktop long ago and ran to NON gaming devices (phones/tablets etc-pre gaming this last year). Now they are becoming GAMING devices...LOL. Guess what happens next :)
IMG.L is broke BTW (had to borrow 20mil just to buy 100mil mips company). Being good at gaming takes 3 things. Good/great hardware, GREAT drivers, and working well with game DEVS. Only NV/AMD have 20yrs of experience in these 3 areas and AMD is broke and in debt (while NV has 3B cash, no debt) as their drivers have been showing for the last two years, giving up the cpu race to Intel, and wasting money on making crap for consoles which are dying (see sales of wiiu, vita, 3ds recently and predictions for them all going forward) etc. Mobile is the next thing and gaming on them to your TV will kill consoles (and console margins are awful for AMD unless they can get to the casual gamer years). It only has to be good enough early, and great over the next few years to stall CASUAL gamers from ever buying a console in years 3-8.
A7 isn't taking over the world, and fewer people plan on buying an iphone every year now as android is just as good and so are their socs. IE Galaxy S4 sells a lot yes? Check Apple's Stock price ;) The new iphone isn't impressive. Nobody was saying WOW this time in reviews.
JarredWalton - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Hardly. It's faster in a few specific corner cases I'm sure, but in most use cases quad-core is just more than tablets need and individually faster dual cores work better. In another 2-3 years, maybe that won't be true, but for now it is. Even then, never did I suggest that the A7 is "way ahead" of the competition. Here's what I said:"As far as performance goes, Tegra 4 is quite fast but it looks like it will be slower than the new A7 at the heart of the iPhone 5s. GPU performance is a bit murkier, with Tegra 4 sometimes doing well (GFXBench 2.7.0 T-Rex HD and Egypt HD for instance have it on par with the A7 and Qualcomm MSM8974), but other times it falls behind (fill rate in particular looks to be a weak point – or a strong point of the A7 GPU). Given the variety of Android tablets along with NVIDIA’s willingness to help optimize gaming performance, however, we expect Tegra 4 will remain competitive."
Being "slower than the A7" can mean 10% or so, and in many cases that's what we're seeing. Performance overall is "competitive" -- not class leading, but not bad by any means.