NVIDIA Downplays Amazon's Kindle Fire Performance Comparison with Tegra 3

Amazon is awfully proud of its next generation Kindle Fire HD tablet and all the upgrades that went into making it. In particular, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos drew attention to the Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 processor that fuels the Kindle Fire HD's performance, claiming that it offers 50 percent more floating operations per second than NVIDIA's Tegra 3 System-on-Chip (SoC), and 40 percent more memory bandwidth (7.5GB/s versus 5.3GB/s). Plain and simple, Bezos said the OMAP part is faster and a better solution than Tegra 3.

NVIDIA Senior Product PR Manager, Igor Stanek, had some things to say about Amazon's presentation.

"It's good to see companies continuing to use Tegra 3 as the standard they compare their products to. The immensely popular Nexus 7 has shown the capabilities of the Tegra 3 processor," Stanek said.

NVIDIA Tegra 3

Google's Nexus 7 unseated the original Kindle Fire as the 7-inch tablet of choice, at least by those tech savvy enough to tell the two tablets apart. Be that as it may, is their truth to Amazon's claim that the dual-core OMAP 4470 is a better slab of silicon than the quad-core Tegra 3?

"You cant measure the consumer's overall experience with synthetic benchmarks," Stanek added. "A better way to measure is with real world apps and use cases. Tegra 3 has shown time and time again that it delivers a great experience for consumers, whether they're gaming, streaming video, or using other apps."'

One thing's for sure -- Tegra 3 is no stranger to the tablet scene. NVIDIA's SoC is found in Asus' Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the above mentioned Nexus 7 device, Microsoft Surface (Windows RT version), and several others.