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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ArthurG - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
you cherry pick the benchs for your claims. I can do the same with 3DMark CPU Physics where Tegra4 is 2 times faster than A7... and it's not class leading ? yeah all depends on how you view it...JarredWalton - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
As noted, quad-core aware applications that people truly use on tablets are a rarity. 3DMark Physics is a perfect example of a benchmark that scales well with cores but doesn't really represent what most apps or even games are doing.You want to talk about cherry picking, even mentioning 3DMark Physics is a perfect example of that. I didn't even cite any specific benchmarks, so I couldn't have "cherry picked". All I said is that in general, it looks like A7 will still be faster than Tegra 4 (and that will be especially true if we compare A7 in a tablet with Tegra 4 in a tablet, or put Tegra 4 in a phone to compare with the iPhone 5s).
TL;DR - Don't get so upset that NVIDIA's Tegra 4 SoC isn't at the top of the performance charts. Tegra 3 and Tegra 2 didn't manage that either, but they still work okay. If you want the fastest SoC in a tablet, however, you're going to be upgrading fairly often.
ArthurG - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I don't work for Nvidia nor I own their shares. And I can say the same about S800 that I consider faster than A7.oooh one last thing, I hope you will not get upset about A7 low performance when you will get Logan in hands ;)
JarredWalton - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I won't get upset either way -- why would I? I don't own an iPhone, and in fact the only Apple product in my house is a 4th Gen iPod Touch. I have a Tegra 2 tablet and a Tegra 3 tablet, as well as a no-name Mediatek tablet (LePan Tab II if you're curious). Tegra 2 is a bit painful to use, but Tegra 3 is at least okay, and ironically the Mediatek tablet is in some cases faster than the Acer A700 T3 tablet. (Faster clocked dual-cores vs. slower clocked quad-cores, donchaknow.)But I'm sure glad to know how much you're looking forward to Logan. Let's see... Tegra 4 was first seen in working hardware how long ago? And we're still not done at the point where there are a lot of Tegra 4 devices, not by a long shot. So when Logan arrives some time next year (probably later in the year, judging by this year), and it's still 28nm but basically double or triples the GPU performance of the current Tegra 4, it will be competing with the next generation of SoCs, and some of those will be 20nm.
Anyway, you may not own any NVIDIA shares, and you may think S800 is faster than A7 as well. In some cases, it is. In general use, however, I think Apple's A7 will come out ahead of most if not all of the current crop of SoCs. Silvermont is right in the same ballpark for CPU performance, but it has a weaker GPU so it's an easy win for the A7. But then, as I noted already, coming out "ahead" isn't a huge deal if the difference is only 5% or even 10-20%. There are other factors that are far more important in any device, like the display, apps, build quality, battery life, etc.
ArthurG - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
"I won't get upset either way -- why would I?"really ? comon, Anandtech is notorious for being an Apple and Intel PR machine ! That's why I joked about Logan.
And talking about Logan, I'm very surprised that you don't have better source. Samples are at OEMs since July, 3 months sooner than T4. Logan devices should be introduced in Spring 2014. It will come in HPM process instead of HPL, giving nearly half node advantage compare to T4. We are talking about 20~30% better electrical performance. That's why S800 is clocked at 2.2~2.3Ghz instead of 1.5~1.7Ghz for S600...
In other hand 20nm at TSMC will come to end-users at very very end of 2014, early 2015...
eiriklf - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Just like to say that even though I seem to have started this rather unproductive discussion, I definitely think it has gone way out of hand, I actually went back to try and edit my post (I cannot find any options to edit) because I thought it was too harsh.Also I would like to clarify that what I meant with way ahead was that saying that the cyclone CPU which runs in a really rather small phone is more powerful than the actively cooled CPU in the shield it seems to me that you are claiming that apple is a long long way ahead in terms of CPU technology. And I truly believe that tegra 4 would give better performance even in single core scenarios if the software was more similarly optimized. It does seem true that the A7 is ahead of it's competitors in terms of performance relative to power consumption, but I do think you are overstating the differences. However it was more a general comment about the content on this site than to you in particular.
I had a similar issue when snapdragon 600 came out and Brian seemed to find huge performance improvements on top of the frequency increase compared to S4 Pro, but if you look at other S4 Pro based units the difference is hardly bigger than the frequency increase would indicate. My main issue is that there is a big tendency to attribute every performance improvement as an improvement in hardware, and given the state of mobile benchmarks that's not even remotely true. All the benchmarks in the iPhone 5s review were run on brand new OS with a brand new browser, and the review hardly considers that and instead in my opinion goes a long way in confirming apples statement about desktop like performance.
JarredWalton - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
While the javascript benchmarks are heavily dependent on the browser (well, at least SunSpider is), they're hardly the only tests that were run. Part of the problem is that there aren't that many cross platform benchmarks available outside of the browser -- and we use most of those. Geekbench, Basemark X, WebXPRT hit the CPU in differing ways and combined with other tests we can get a pretty good idea about the overall CPU performance.More importantly, looking at iPhone 5/5c with iOS 7 relative to iPhone 5s tells us a lot about the performance of A7. I don't think anyone would try to say the A6 SoC is horribly slow, and with A7 basically outperforming it by 30-100% (with the average being closer to 40% -- just eyballing here, though, so I'm not trying to be precise!).... Anyone suggesting A7 isn't an impressive bump in performance over the existing chips is trying to shovel something.
Cortex-A15 is fast, sure, but power efficiency is at best suspect. (Which isn't to say it's not more efficient than some other CPUs/SoCs.) Apple went off on their own with Swift precisely because they didn't feel A15 was what they wanted. With their size and income, Apple actually has the ability to really start to push things if they want, and we're seeing that now. 5-10 years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple designed processors outpacing most of the stuff from AMD...and that may start to happen before 5 years even.
At the end of the day, I'm a technology enthusiast, and so people doing interesting things with technology are what excites me, even if I don't ever buy the product in question. Intel has done that for decades now, NVIDIA and AMD do it to varying degrees with GPUs (and now SoCs), and Apple is... well, for a change we're seeing a lot more on the hardware side rather than just the software side. I don't care for OS X (or Linux), and I didn't like MacOS back in the day; the massive following of Apple fanatics doesn't help.
But that doesn't mean I can't be impressed by some of what they're doing, and the A7 is a lot more than I was expecting from the "S-cycle refresh" out of Cupertino. Is it the best thing ever? Nope, and things are now complex enough that there are always going to be use cases where no single chip is fastest in every way. Will Logan be better when it ships? Maybe, but right now A7 is shipping and available and Logan is at best a long shot to come out in volume before the end of the year.
FWIW, I do like some aspects of iOS, but at the end of the day I still prefer my Android devices. Price is a big factor though; if I had the money, you can bet I'd be buying an iPhone 5s and an iPad 4.
ArthurG - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Sorry but Ramos is shit. Their firmware/software is so bogus that its not usable. Seen it, done it, forgot it...JarredWalton - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I'm debating deleting this comment (promoting Ramos Technology and TabletSprint from jazpotter10) as spam. Feel free to vote on it. It doesn't have a URL linked in, so I'm still on the fence.fm123 - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I've seen this post on about 20 other similar articles, seems to make it spam.