What is Tegra?

When installing Jetpack in the Jetson series, a word that is often encountered is L4T. L4T stands for Linux For Tegra. So what is Tegra? Tegra refers to NVidia's SoC products. However, the first Tegra was not an SOC that worked with a GPU like the Jetson series as it is now.Let's take a look at Tegra's history. 

Apple and PortalPlayer

In 1999, two years after Jobs returned to Appl, Napster, an MP3 music file sharing service, gained popularity. The popularity of MP3 players, which originated in Korea, is also starting to flare up. Apple paid attention to Japan's Toshiba's 1.8-inch ultra-small hard disk, which can be used inexpensively instead of NAND flash memory-based players led by Korean companies. At that time, instead of expensive and low-capacity NAND, they decided to make a jukebox-like MP3 player using a small hard disk that could store many songs.

<apple mp3 player ipod>

This is the famous Apple iPod. When Apple made the iPod, it obtained a chipset from Portal Player, a start-up. Apple tested products from famous semiconductor companies such as STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments (TI), and Cyrus Logic. However, the chips of these companies did not satisfy Jobs, and he chose Portal Player, a start-up company. 

Portal Player designed a system-on-chip (SoC) based on ARM's design. When using a semiconductor designed by Portal Player, it is said that the sound quality was excellent compared to using a semiconductor from other company.

In this way, PortalPlayer, a company in its first year of establishment, became a key semiconductor supplier for Apple's first mobile device led by Jobs. Thanks to ARM, Apple and Portal Player were able to drastically reduce the semiconductor development period compared to their competitors and accelerated iPod development.

The iPod (classic version using a hard disk), released in 2001, was a hit. and MP3 players made by Korea's Cowon and iRiver disappeared one after another. And the iPod's dominance began. The iPod was Apple's first successful mobile device. It is no exaggeration to say that Apple's status with the iPhone and iPad began with the iPod. The iPod also signaled the rise of ARM and the beginning of the era of low-power semiconductors for mobile devices.

As iPod sales increased, the sales and profits of portal players, which used to exclusively supply semiconductors, also improved. The world paid attention to the 'heart' of the iPod. Venture capitalists lined up to lend money to Portal Player. Apple relied entirely on Portal Player. 90% of portal player sales came from Apple.

With the iPod halo, Portal Player went public on NASDAQ in 2004. Investments flocked to companies that supply semiconductors to Apple.

PortalPlayer abandoned by Apple

The public offering price, which was $11 at the time of listing on Nasdaq, soared to $25 on the first day, and PortalPlayer succeeded in IPO. Portal Player, which succeeded in an IPO, did not stop supplying chips for iPods and tried to develop a new business field, causing friction with Apple.

Just like Apple today, Apple in the past was extremely wary of relying too much on a specific vendor. Apple started looking for new partners to diversify its chip supply.

Apple's new partner is Samsung Electronics in South Korea. Instead of the PortalPlayer's chip, Apple used a chip made by Samsung Electronics in the second generation 'iPod nano'. It wasn't until after the release of the iPod nano 2 that it was revealed that Samsung's chips were used. PortalPlayer loses Apple, which accounts for 90% of its sales, and its sales rapidly decrease.

Then, in 2006, the company was merged into NVidia in a diminutive state. And the SoC made by NVidia, which merged PortalPlayer, is Tegra. Therefore, early Tegra chips are based on the technology of PortalPlayer.

The first Tegra chips were not SoCs used in the Jetson series as they are now, but were targeted at MP3s, game consoles, and mobile devices.

NVidia and Tegra

Early Tegra chips were not successful in the market. Mobile chips were defeated by Quelcomm and Apple, and the game market was also defeated by failing to supply Tegra chips to Sony's PS series and Microsoft's XBox series. But NVidia hasn't given up on the Tegra chip and has continued to make NVidia's flagship low-power SoCs that incorporate powerful GPUs. And recently, the popularity of Edge AI and Tegra chips are gaining popularity as they are widely used in fields such as self-driving.

A brief history of TegraChip follows.

Tegra APX

It is the first Tegra chip series created in 2008. APX series, such as APX2500 and APX2600, are chips made for mobile devices, and Tegra600 and Tegra650 are chips for small electronic devices such as MP3 players. Coincidentally, these chips were supplied to Samsung Electronics' MP3 players. It is interesting that Samsung Electronics used NVidia's Tegra in their products while supplying chipsets for Apple's iPod.

Tegra 2

Unveiled in 2010, the second-generation Tegra chip was created by integrating the popular GeForce GPU. Video performance has improved dramatically and support for Linux such as Ubuntu has begun. The beginning of L4T is at this point.

Tegra 3

And the following year, in 2011, Tegra3 was released. Because Tegra3 used a 4-core CPU, its computational power was significantly improved compared to Tegra2. Tegra 3 is the first Tegra release to support ARM's SIMD extension, NEON.

Tegra 4

It was announced in 2013 and has 4 cores like Tegra3. However, it has a 5th low power core (Coretex A15) that is not detected by the OS and is used in the background to reduce power usage. The video processing power is also much better with the enhanced GeForce GPU.

Tegra X1

Among the well-known Jetson series, TX1 and Nano products belong here. Tegra X1 was unveiled in 2015. It uses a Maxwell-based 256-core GPU. (Nano has 128 cores)

Tegra X2

Among the well-known Jetson series, TX2 belongs here. It uses a 256 CUDA core GPU based on Pascal.

Xavier

It was introduced in 2016, but actually only came to the market in 2019. It uses a Volta-based 512 CUDA core GPU.

Products such as AGX Xavier and Xavier NX belong to this category.

Orin

Introduced in 2018, AGX Orin products are available as of January 2023, Orin NX is not yet on the market.

It uses Ampere-based 2048 CUDA cores and 64 Tensor Core GPUs.

Wrapping up

For more information on the history of Tegra introduced above, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra. 

Since Tegra 2, which was released in 2010, Linux has been properly supported, and the L4T version has also been continuously developed. L4T is based on the Ubuntu distribution for ARM. NVidia provides JetPack, which packages software (open source programs such as Cuda library, TensorRT library, and OpenCV) for using the GPU with L4T.