Nvidia Tegra 5 To Be More Powerful Than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3

Nvidia’s Senior Vice President of Content and Technology has been offering some potent statements to the media recently. Tony Tamasi has stated that Nvidia’s next generation Mobile Processor, Tegra 5, will outperform the current generation of consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

“The PS3 and Xbox 360 are barely more powerful than mobile devices… The next click of mobile phones will outperform”

On the face of things it seems like a very bold statement and totally unrealistic, but if we look at the numbers it actually does look plausible.

Nvidia’s Tegra 2 had 4.8 GFLOPS, Nvidia’s Tegra 3 had 12 GFLOPS and Nvidia’s current generation Tegra 4 has 80 GFLOPS. Current generation consoles, the PS3 and Xbox 360, both boast about 200 GFLOPS so Nvidia would have to more than double the next generation to achieve this. However, given Tegra 4 was just under 7 times more powerful than Tegra 3, seeing the 2.5 times rise in Tegra 5 over Tegra 4 doesn’t look that unrealistic at all. To put all these GFLOPS figures into context, Nvidia’s GTX Titan produces 4500 GFLOPS while the PlayStation 4 is expected to produce 1800 GLOPS.

Even though we will see mobile technology using graphics hardware of this performance level in the not so distant future, it is unlikely they will ever grace mobile phones any time soon due to the power consumption figures. Even though Tegra 5 will be very modest in terms of power consumption it will still be too much for most mobile phone batteries to handle so will be almost exclusively reserved for tablets and other larger mobile devices.

Nvidia’s Project Shield, for example, is expected to be powered by Tegra 5.

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