NVIDIA has announced today the Tegra 4i — the cheaper, little brother of their beastly Tegra 4 system-on-a-chip. The Tegra 4i trades the Tegra 4’s ARM Cortex-A15 CPU for a 2.4 GHz quad-core Cortex-A9 r4 (plus low-power companion core), and reduces the number of GPU cores from 72 to 60. A significant advantage to the Tegra 4i over the Tegra 4 is that it comes with an upgraded NVIDIA i500 radio, which adds on-die LTE support, and is said to ‘significantly’ outperform the leading integrated LTE chip (*cough* Qualcomm). The cool thing about NVIDIA’s i500 is that it can be-reprogrammed over-the-air to support new frequencies and air interfaces.
The Tegra 4i shares NVIDIA’s new ‘Chimera’ HDR photo and video architecture with the Tegra 4, which allows HDR panoramas to be taken without requiring single-direction movement. What particular use this might be, I do not know, but it sure sounds like it requires some pretty impressive hardware.
NVIDIA plan to demo the new SoC at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. Hopefully we’ll see some OEMs announcing some nifty new Tegra 4 and 4i devices there too.
Next version of the nexus 7? Or will that have a snap dragon s4?