[Galaxy Tab 10.1 General] galtom:
My mistake - Qualcomm is not there yet as Snapdragon is 1 core only.

According to wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapdragon_(system_on_chip)

The Snapdragon application processor core, dubbed Scorpion, is Qualcomm's own design. It has many features similar to those of the ARM Cortex-A8 core and it is based on the ARM v7 instruction set, but theoretically has much higher performance for multimedia-related SIMD operations.[1]

So one might say it is roughly based on previous ARM design. That does ont matter for our discussion.

All the remaining SOC's (2 core) based on ARM A9 are "inside" almost the same.

Since I read somewhere what ARM "road map" for future designs looks like (see what Kal - El will do) I have a worry.

Maybe inability to play HP h.264 videos in 720p and above by Tegra 2 is not actually Tegra fault but it is "hidden" in the chip design itself?

If that is the case all A9 based SoC's will have the same problem, including Exynos?!?

Since I am not an expert I would think that the only way to solve this is such a design that GPU integrated with A9 cores would perform all calculations necessary to play video?

Whole situation with this Tegra 2 limitation is very strange.

1. If good GPU is needed Nvidia should have no problem with this judging by their heritage.

2. If it is ARM design that is the problem... how come? Galaxy Tab (first) has no problem with any videos and is based no previous generation of ARM A8.

Logical (in my opinion) answer is:

Indeed A8 and A9 chips can not play those videos by themselves but because Galaxy Tab had PowerVR SGX540 graphics processor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab#Hardware) it was able to do so.

On wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR) one can read:

PowerVR VideoPowerVR Video Cores(MVED/VXD) and Video/Display Cores(PDP)

PowerVR's PDP series is used in some HDTVs, including the Sony Bravia.

[edit]Series5 (SGX)

PowerVR's SGX series features pixel, vertex, and geometry shader hardware, supporting OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 10.1 Shader Model 4.1.

The SGX GPU core is included in several popular systems-on-chip (SoC) used in many portable devices. Apple uses the A4 (manufactured by Samsung) in their iPhone 4, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV. Texas Instruments' OMAP 3 and 4 series SoC's are used in the Nokia N900, Sony Ericsson Vivaz, Motorola Droid/Milestone, Archos 70, and others. Samsung produces the Hummingbird SoC and use it in their Galaxy S, Galaxy Tab, Samsung Wave S8500 and Samsung Wave II S8530 devices.

Intel uses the SGX 535 as its GMA 500 and GMA 600 integrated graphics for their Atom platform.

Tegra 2 uses Nvidia's own GPU - no 720p. playback

I do not suspect that Exynos/Smamsung would use the same GPU instead of PowerVR. Especialy that in SoC they built for Apple they have used PowerVR design: The A5 contains a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU[3] and a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU.

This means that:

If GT 10.1 will come with Exynos inside there is (in my opinion) 99% chances it will play all video formats.

If one has Apple iPad 2 with right software (and jailbrake?) ipad2 will do the same (what a shape its screen is below 720p).

Now, it would also be really funny if dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU would run games better than GeForce ULP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra_2#Tegra_2_series).

The only problem is... Exynos is rumoured to have Mali 400 (how good is Mali 400 against SGX543?) - unknown :-(