Tegra 250 development board now available

Just thought I’d share the news on the new Tegra 250 ARM based development board from Nvidia. Dual-core 1Ghz Cortex-A9, with 1GB of DRAM and 512MB of Flash RAM. Video out is 1920×1080 and 1600×1200. Price is $399 but is currently only available to registered Tegra developers (which is free to join). More info is here.

A demo of Epic Games Unreal 3 engine looks amazing at high resolution. Looks like we could have some very fast ARM hardware launched this year. Of course, finding a suitable porting platform is another matter entirely.

Nice – I think that’s the first Cortex-A9 dev board (or for that matter, device of any kind) to hit the market.

Of course, finding a suitable porting platform is another matter entirely.

When the OMAP4 hits I believe TI are planning on releasing a new beagleboard revision using it. OMAP4 should be comparable to Tegra 2 in terms of power, and so could present itself as an easy target for porting, since most of the OMAP3 drivers are likely to work with only minor modification. The only thing I know of that would make the OMAP4 weaker than the competition is that I haven’t yet seen any evidence of TI adding PCI-e or SATA controllers, both of which would be nice to have on future RISC OS hardware.

Of course, there’d still be the problem of working out how to sensibly support multi-core CPUs within RISC OS, so even if a suitable Cortex-A9 dev board comes along I’m not planning on buying one unless 10 or so godlike ARM coders descend from the heavens and offer to help out :(

I am not a programmer but is it possible to use the existing wimp polling system to run apps or threads on different cores? by extending the wimp pole to include the core number ? so the wimp poles events to check what is running then we have core manager to manage or is this to simplistic.

I’m not planning on buying one unless 10 or so godlike ARM coders descend from the heavens and offer to help out :(

Lets hope that the ROOL team will have some time this year to do some development themselves. I know Ben was looking into the possibility of a tackling some of RISC OS bigger issues – sometime, maybe, possibly.

Companies seem to be in “high powered ARM” mode at the moment. Marvell announced the successor to the plug computer a few days ago – featuring the ARMADA 300 running at 2 GHz.

At the same day, they announced the ARMADA 610, running at 1 GHz and integrating a FullHD encoder and decoder along with a 3D graphics accelerator. It can control no less than four displays at 2Kx2K each…

And one day later, they announced a quad-core variant of their ARMADA range, with every core running at 1 GHz+.

I would be happy with the 2 GHz single core variant for the moment, however ;-)

Just thought I’d let you all know that Nvidia has a special Easter discount where they are offering the Tegra 250 development board for only $99 USD (a saving of $300). Very reasonable for a dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 board.

Of course RISC OS will not run on it, but I thought some of you may be interested in it – even if just using it with Android/Linux etc..

Details/T&C’s available here

Alan, two things: 1. NVIDIA won’t ship outside US 2. GDA 2010 Coupon codes are needed for the $300 discount.

So either you live in the US and have coupon codes and are willing to arrange a Tegra 250 development board for me or you are poking my eyes out with what I can’t have..

Hope it is the first of the two options :-)

Alan, two things: 1. NVIDIA won’t ship outside US 2. GDA 2010 Coupon codes are needed for the $300 discount.

I read the Nvidia page and somehow managed to skim over the part about needing a GDC promo code. Oops. Sorry.

I knew about the shipping restriction, but since that is easily bypassed these days by companies that specialise in this area I didn’t see that as a problem.

Sorry for any damage to your eyes :(

A demo of Epic Games Unreal 3 engine looks amazing at high resolution.

Are you saying that the ARM Cortex A9 is capable of Unreal Engine 3 ?!

Now THAT would be impressive! (a UDK ROOL port would be sort of fun ;-) ).

Edit: Though your other post suggests A9 isn’t riscos compatible?