NVIDIA"s Tegra 4i chip includes integrated LTE support and is designed for smartphones.
When NVIDIA announced the Tegra 4 last month, one thing it didn"t announce was integrated LTE support, something previous generations of NVIDIA"s system-on-a-chip ARM products have also not offered. Today, however, NVIDIA is remedying that with the Tegra 4i, its first ARM product with LTE capabilities integrated.
NVIDIA"s Tegra 4i combines the company"s new i500 LTE modem with its Tegra 4 SOC in what it claims is "a chip half the size of its nearest competitor." The Tegra 4i features a quad-core 2.3GHz CPU that was co-designed by NVIDIA and ARM as well as the company"s traditional battery-saving fifth core. The CPU cores are based on ARM"s newest design, the R4 Cortex A9.
Unlike the company"s recently announced Tegra 4, the Tegra 4i chip is designed for a wide range of smartphones. NVIDIA is positioning the larger Tegra 4 as the company"s tablet and high-end smartphone offering, while the Tegra 4i was designed solely for smartphones.
According to NVIDIA, the chip uses the same architecture as the Tegra 4 and offers 60 GPU cores, or five times the amount Tegra 3 chips feature. That"s less than the 72 GPU cores featured in the Tegra 4, however.
NVIDIA created a reference Tegra 4i smartphone called Phoenix.
The integrated i500 LTE modem is based on the company"s i410 LTE modem, a product featured in the ASUS VivoTab running Windows RT. NVIDIA claims the second-generation LTE modem is "more than five times the computational capacity of its predecessor."
Also included in the chip is NVIDIA"s new Chimera Computational Photography Architecture, which will give users the ability to capture HDR photos faster than any other ARM products currently on the market. Panoramic HDR photos will also be capable with the technology.
NVIDIA plans to show the Tegra 4i at Mobile World Congress later this month.
Source: NVIDIA | Images via NVIDIA